A Quiet War
by Roguewrld
Summary: After the battle for New York, SHIELD's HR department goes to war. A #coulsonlives story Not canon compliant past "Girl in the Flower Dress"
1. Chapter 1

**Suzanne from HR**

It took a very special person to run the Human Resources department for SHIELD. SHIELD's agents were literal human resources, used by Fury to do whatever they did best.

Some of them weren't, in the strictest definition, human. Some of them were human but couldn't perform basic functions like paying their rent on time or shopping for groceries. When those agents wanted to learn how to function in society, HR taught them. When they didn't or couldn't, HR took care of them, cultivated the most myopic landlords, set up checking accounts that made automatic payments and had meals and groceries delivered. Even for the most normal of SHIELD's misfit toys, HR managed cover stories and dealt with insurance agencies.

HR was Suzanne's domain and she was very good at her job. She helped people, did whatever they needed to keep going. After New York, it got hard. She spent the first three days doing triage, getting injured agents off the helicarrier, finding work crews that could pass background checks and doling out shots from the bottle in her desk drawer when she couldn't do anything else.

On the fourth day, the head of Medical came in. He looked like he hadn't slept since the attack and he sat wordlessly in her chair for ten minutes before she put a shot of espresso into his hands. "Andrew, did you need something?"

He looked around, nervously, then spoke so quietly she could barely hear him. "Agent Coulson is in my sickbay."

"Oh." She'd heard the notice come in over the emergency channel. "I thought he was dead."

"No, but he's in bad shape. We patched him up, put him on a ventilator. They said Barton was himself again, I wanted to bring him down and make some decisions but Fury shows up and demands Coulson's wedding ring, says he has to tell Barton his husband's dead." Andrew downed the shot of espresso like it was vodka but he didn't look any more alert. "An hour later, Barton shows up with Romanoff and demands to see the body."

"What did you do?" She wasn't sure how to handle this. Fury was supposed to tell he when he pulled shit like this, so she could plan contingencies.

"What could I do? I told them I'd had to cremate all the bodies." Andrew picked up the paperweight off her desk, turning it over and over in his hands. "He cried. I've done field surgery on that guy without so much as a shot of whiskey, I've never seen him cry. Romanoff dragged him out of the room and five minutes later Stark and Rogers come barging in. Stark threatens to sue me, Rogers demands we turn the remains and personal effects over to Barton. Suzanne, you have to help me. I don't have anything to give them."

"Let me talk to Fury. We'll get this straightened out." She opened Outlook on her laptop and scheduled a meeting first thing the next morning. "Fury and his long games. If Barton shows up again, send him to me."

* * *

Fury didn't show for their meeting, or the one she scheduled the next day, or the one after that. Barton never showed up at her office, which she was preversly grateful for. At this point, she probably would have taken him down to medical, Fury's plans be damned.

Andrew showed up seven days post-battle sporting a full beard and a twitch. "You've got to get Coulson out of here. He needs round the clock care and we're a trauma ward. When he wakes up he's going to need all kinds of services."

"With a death certificate on file, all his cover identities will have been terminated. He doesn't have any health insurance. I'm going to have to create a new ID from scratch."

"No time." Her email chimed and Andrew startled in his chair. "I've got him pumped full of propofol and we wrapped his face in bandages he doesn't need but we can't keep this quiet much longer. Things are going to go back to normal here pretty soon and someone is going to notice we've got him stashed."

"Okay, deep breaths. I'm going to take care of this. Get me a report of what kind of care he'll need after he leaves the carrier and I'll make sure he gets it." Suzanne glanced at her screen. The email was about recruitment and she wanted to punch her screen. She didn't care anymore. She was getting Agent Coulson out of here.

* * *

The problem was, the situation was really complicated. Agent Coulson was a Level Seven agent and he was legally dead at the moment. There were things in his head that no one below his clearance level could hear so she couldn't just stash him in any hospital.

Fury wouldn't meet with her, wouldn't let her in on whatever the hell he was doing and she couldn't wait any longer.

She made a few phone calls. The first was to American Express. The second was to the penthouse at Stark Tower. She slept the sleep of the just.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Bruce Banner

Summary: Bruce was always angry. This was just one more thing.

"Doctor Banner."

Bruce looked at the ceiling, he couldn't help himself. "What do you need, JARVIS?"

"There is a telephone call from SHIELD on the penthouse line. Sir and Miss Potts are both currently occupied and are not to be disturbed."

"Who wants to talk to us?" If it was Nick Fury, Tony was answering, whatever Pepper was doing to him.

"It's SHIELD's human resources department, Doctor." JARVIS's tone sounded a bit puzzled. "When I inquired to the nature of the call, she apologized but said she needed someone with a corporeal body."

"Put her through, JARVIS." Did they need to fill out forms? Tony had said he was a consultant, maybe there was a formal process. Bruce was pretty sure he wouldn't pass the background check. "This is Doctor Banner."

"Doctor Banner? Where is Mr. Stark?" There was a brief pause. "Never mind. You'll do. I have a situation here, Doctor. We're currently docked in New Jersey, undergoing repairs. Would you be willing to come meet with me?"

"I'm not sure that's a good idea." He and Thor had caused massive property damage although Fury hadn't seemed to mind.

"I can badge you in. There won't be any official record of your presence here. I need help, Doctor."

That was how SHIELD got him before and it still worked, damn it. "I'll be there as soon as I can."

He took a sedative and then the train. Cabs were right out, traffic made the Other Guy nervous. At rest in her dry dock, the helicarrier looked almost normal, a regular large ship undergoing maintenance. If you overlooked the giant engines that let her fly. Suzanne, the head of HR, was standing outside the fence. She clipped a plastic visitor's badge to his chest. "Follow me."

She used a swipe card to get back into the secure area and no one seemed to be paying them much attention. Everyone here knew who he was, they wouldn't find his presence alarming as long as he looked calm.

When they were in the elevator, she finally spoke. "Thank you for coming. I wasn't sure what else to do. Involving Agent Barton at this point seemed dangerous."

Clint was the worst off of all of them and that was saying something. He'd spent the first few days drunk but on Wednesday he'd had a screaming fight with Natasha and gone back to his own place. He'd come back the next day and patched things up, sober, but he was hurt she'd lied to him, even by omission. "I still don't understand what you needed that JARVIS couldn't give you." JARVIS had some legal right to sign things for Tony, Bruce hadn't been able to understand Pepper's explanation.

"JARVIS is a marvel and if he had feet, I would gladly be having this conversation with him." They reached the medical floor and she said hello to the chief medical officer. Bruce wondered if they were releasing something of Agent Coulson's from containment and it needed to be picked up. Everyone here was probably too busy to leave long enough to get back to the city and it would explain why she needed someone with feet.

"Doctor Banner is here to help us with our problem. Can you let us into Isolation, Andrew?"

"Oh, thank god." The man practically jumped to his feet and led him to their isolation area. "I've been running out of excuses."

There was a heavily bandaged body on the bed, hooked up to life support equipment. Bruce snagged the chart from the end of the bed. The patient information was blank, the case notes were blank, only vitals and procedures were recorded. "Who is this?

"The man who saved the world." Suzanne sat down in the guest chair and toed off her shoes. "I'm currently organizing his memorial service. It's going to be very touching."

"I don't…" The patient had a large bandage over his chest. Bruce looked at the file, then at the patient. He took a deep breath, then another. "You're sure?"

"Oh, I'm sure. Andrew took control of the patient as soon as he came into medical. He coded on the way here but they brought him back. We have very gifted surgeons and access to all sorts of equipment we've taken off mad scientists. That is, absolutely, without a doubt Agent Coulson."

The Other Guy rumbled in the back of his brain. Bruce took the chair next to Suzanne and read through the file more carefully. "What does the Director have to say about this?"

"The Director made Doctor Vitale sign a death certificate and refuse to discuss the issue any further. I need Agent Coulson off this boat, but as someone who is legally dead he has no identification, no medical insurance and no next of kin. He has to go somewhere, we can't keep him here, but he's a walking collection of classified data drugged to the gills. I can't put him in a civilian facility."

No wonder she hadn't called Clint. Or Natasha. They would have taken Agent Coulson and killed anyone who tried to stop them. "I'm going to need to talk to Doctor Vitale. I want to make sure we have the right equipment for Agent Coulson's care." There was a full medical facility in Stark Tower but it was intended for trauma care not long term care.

"Do you need to talk to Mr. Stark?"

"No." Absolutely not. If he gave Tony time to think about this, Iron Man would show up and blast his way in.

* * *

Tony was supervising his cleaning bots when Bruce got back. "So, I'm thinking we put some kind of art installation in the Loki hole. Then we fill it in with a clear epoxy and seal it."

"Tony."

"Maybe some small sculptures, representing each of us? Or a portrait of that shot of us they got from the news chopper, where we're all standing back to back." Tony gave one of the cleaning bots a nudge with his foot. It had gotten stuck trying to pick up a piece of debris over it's carrying capacity. "Go get a buddy."

"Tony. We need to talk."

"No, no talking. Science. You promised me science. Talking-"

"I'm not going anywhere." He had to derail Tony before his abandonment complex got rolling. They'd only know each other a week but he thought he had a pretty good handle on Tony maintenance. "I need to buy some equipment for the medical lab and we're going to need to hire a nurse. Or four? Four would be better."

"A nurse? Why do you need nurses? I promise, I don't need that much patching up." That was a lie, as far as Bruce could tell, but maybe Tony hadn't ever sought treatment for his minor injuries before.

"They're not for me and if we can cover up why we're hiring them that would be ideal." Bruce dug his phone out of his pocket. He'd put his phone in airplane mode and Suzanne had allowed him to take video of Agent Coulson. He'd taken handwritten notes. "JARVIS, privacy mode."

Tony watched the video, listened to Bruce describe the injuries he could observe and what treatment had been delivered. He could tell the exact moment Tony figured out who the patient was. It was lucky Suzanne hadn't gotten through to Tony.

When the video completed, Tony went over to a panel and hit a button. "JARVIS, are you back with us?"

"Yes, sir."

"Get Bruce anything he needs. Create a classified project, designate it a random serial number and store it on a physical device in my bedroom. When we're not discussing it, the device should be physically disconnected from the network."

"Project 2432354556 is created, sir. Network device is connected."

Tony walked over to the bar and poured himself a whiskey. "Subject of project is an adult male, approximately 51 years of age. Subject was injured in the Battle for New York, defending the Carrier. Bruce?"

Bruce looked at his notes. "Subject was DOA when medical team arrived but was revived enroute to medical facilities. Subject was treated with several classified medical technologies which repaired major damage to his heart and lungs. Treatments are recorded as very physically taxing on the patient, who has been in a medically induced coma since his treatments began. Treatment has reached the limit of medical technology available to SHIELD without use of a variant of the super soldier formula. Although the subject is a man of moral character suitable for transition with formula, his weakened state makes it's use inadvisable unless an emergency occurs."

They talked all night, and in the morning they made a private contract with the an agency for a staff of round the clock nurses who wouldn't ask too many questions.

They transported Agent Coulson to the tower on Saturday afternoon. When he was safe in his new room on one of the undamaged and unoccupied residence floors, Bruce finally felt something in his chest unfurl.

They put two comfortable chairs in the room and sat themselves in them. Tony was still twitching with rage, but it was starting to pass. "We need to tell Clint. Today, if I can get to him."

"Natasha will know where he is." They would need to tell the Captain as well, and the whole thing was going to be a disaster.

"I told Pepper last night. She has people combing our code for SHIELD's backdoors. JARVIS has identified all the ones he can but Agent Coulson had access to JARVIS in Malibu a few years ago." Tony got up and started straightening the sheets on the bed. Clint had told them about Phil's need for order. He'd been the kind of man who made his bed each morning like he was still in the Army. "He had personal overrides, but who knows who else can use them? I may need to disconnect the whole Tower from the network, take JARVIS back to Malibu. I need a new server farm so I can boot up one of his backups and he can examine himself. It's going to take weeks."

"Team dinner tonight. We need their help."

* * *

Thor had spent the whole day in the kitchen, observing and playing guinea pig. Asgard traded widely but their cuisine was similar to Europe's hundred of years ago and he'd never had Indian food. He had, however, kneaded bread as punishment duty and could cook over an open fire so Bruce left the naan to him.

Clint was a no-show for dinner. When Natasha came in around five, she said he was having dinner with the Director. Tony and Bruce exchanged looks but what could they do?

Steve was spooning a huge bowl out of the crockpot. "I haven't had curry since the last time I was in London. This smells different though."

"It's a more authentic version than you would have gotten in England back then." Bruce took a bowl for himself and stirred it a little. He had to eat or the Other Guy got fussy but at the same time he was so angry it was hard to swallow. "Natasha, have you ever met Suzanne from HR?"

"Sure." Natasha put a swirl of Sriracha sauce on her bowl and sat down. "She builds our cover identities and manages our civilian lives."

"She called me yesterday. She had something she needed to get to Clint." They shouldn't talk about this where JARVIS could hear, not until Tony had checked him out. The whole floor Phil was on was disconnected from the network. "I wanted to show it to you and the Captain, before we gave it to Clint."

"I thought we got all of Agent Coulson's personal effects back already." Steve had been clutching his fork too hard, he had to unbend it. "I don't like how SHIELD has been handling this. Are they usually this casual about their people's well beings?"

"No." Natasha poured herself a glass of wine and passed the bottle. "The Director tore Doctor Vitale apart for disposing of the bodies but he claimed to be under orders. We can't trust the WSC. They're arrogant, they almost destroyed the whole city."

Thor sniffed the bottle and filled his glass. "Fury was eager to get the Tesseract off your world, out of their influence."

"No more shop talk." Tony took the bottle from Thor. His smile was professional, not the real one they'd started to see. "Dinner first."

* * *

Natasha had cursed when they'd walked into the secure room and then she'd done some very detailed examination of Phil's body that Bruce was almost embarrassed to watch. When she was done, she gently covered him back up. "It's him."

"Why were we told he was dead?" Steve had been standing at the edge of the room while Natasha had been checking but now he came to Phil's bedside. "How long has he been here?"

"About three hours. Until we had him out of SHIELD custody, I didn't want to risk it." Tony had made them take the stairs. He'd disabled the card reader and used a physical key to let them on the floor. "I don't know what kind of game Fury's playing, but I'm not interested in playing anymore."

Thor crouched beside the bed. "My mother would surely grant her assistance, to wake him from this state. She has much experience in waking men from unnatural sleeps."

"He's not enchanted, Thor." Bruce wasn't sure if Thor would know what a coma was, but he gave it a shot. "He's hurt, badly. We're keeping him asleep so he'll heal but we could wake him up if we had to."

"This is treachery, then." He rose, and Bruce remembered he was a prince, a man of power.

"Fury burned him? He burned Phil?" Natasha stroked his hair. She looked confused. "Why?"

"Burned?" Bruce wasn't sure he understood the reference.

"To pretend Phil was dead during the battle, to make Stark and Rogers get their acts together? That's pure Fury. He would do it in a heartbeat. I didn't really believe it, not until he came to tell Clint." Natasha ran her fingers over the beard that had grown on Phil's face. "When he had Phil declared officially dead, HR would have had to dismantle their maintenance of his civilian life. They take very good care of us. Most of us can't live anything resembling a normal life without them. Right now, Philip J. Coulson doesn't exist. He can't use his bank account, his health insurance, nothing. Eventually, the doctors in Medical would have had to ship him off the carrier. He would have ended up in a public hospital as an indigent patient. Treachery is a good word for it, Thor."

"They left him out in the cold." Steve was gripping the bed rails. "We need to get Clint here, tonight."

* * *

They were sprawled on the furniture on Tony's floor. He'd offered to them all drunk again, but Bruce had passed. Steve hadn't and Tony had better luck this timed than he had the first night after the battle.

"I had a friend. He was a spy. A sniper." Steve sipped whatever Tony had put in his glass like it was water. "I fought my way into a Hydra base to save him. I lost him on a mission. If he was alive, if someone had taken him from me and my superior knew? I would have done anything to get him back."

Natasha shifted in her chair, but she didn't say anything.

The elevator opened and Clint came in, an overnight bag slung over one shoulder. "I can't stay in that apartment anymore. Whoa. What happened?"

Bruce slid out of his chair. "Come with me." He took Clint down ten flights of stairs and unlocked the door with a key. "This is yours. We set up a bedroom for you."

"What? I thought Stark was building us whole floors up at the top of the building." Clint put the key on his key ring. "What's with the key? Doesn't this whole place ran on biometrics?"

"The biometrics run through JARVIS. He's not active on this floor." Bruce took him into the living room.

The evening nurse was sitting at the monitors. "Doctor."

"Dana. This is Clint Barton. You're to allow him access at any time. No exceptions. He has power of attorney, if you or your colleagues have any care questions they should go to him."

"Of course." She gave Clint a pleasant smile. "We're taking very good care of him, I promise."

"Taking care of who?"

Bruce tugged him into the room. Clint froze where he stood. The bag he'd still had over his shoulder dropped to the floor. "Phil?"

The door to the master bathroom was open and Clint pushed past Bruce to get to it. Bruce could hear him throwing up. When that stopped, he went into the bathroom and got Clint a glass of water. Clint was leaning over the toilet but he looked up at Bruce. "Is that real? Is that Phil?"

"We only found out yesterday. We wanted to bring him somewhere safe for you."

"Thank you." Clint pushed himself to his feet and took the water. He drank it in one go and went to Phil's bedside. "I made Nick Fury dinner. I gave him a dvd from Phil. We talked about the house Phil and I have in Portland. He told me a war story."

"I'm sorry. No one knows we have him. This whole floor is offline, we're doing our best to keep him under the radar." Bruce put a chair under Clint. He looked like he was going to fall over any second. "Someone inside SHIELD tipped us off."

Clint pressed a kiss to Phil's forehead and then curled his fingers around Phil's wrist. He sat and rested his head on the bed next to Phil's hand. "I have level 7 clearance. Do you know what it takes to get that, considering I have a record? I've successfully carried out every assassination order SHIELD gave me, except one. I have resisted days of torture to protect other assets, to the point of losing most of my hearing on one side and I have to shoot with my non-dominant hand now. And compared to Phil's commitment, mine is nothing. He would gladly have died in that room, if it meant saving the world."

"Clint." Bruce wasn't sure what to say. "I'm going to get Natasha for you."

Clint raised his head. His eyes were clear. "They did this because of me. To punish me."

* * *

They left Clint alone with Phil all day Sunday but on Monday they made a horseshoe of chairs around the bed and camped out in their room. Tony wasn't sitting in his, he was pacing. "We need to get the Tesseract out of SHIELD's control."

"I will return it to my father's vault. If they will not relinquish it, I will return with a force capable of retrieving it." Thor had brought his hammer into the room and his hands were clenched around it's hilt.

"Then what? We can't trust SHIELD." Steve had brought his sketchbook with him and he'd been working on a sketch of the room. "We need to scatter. We can't risk them using us against each other."

"I'm not going anywhere." It was the first thing Clint had said since he'd told Bruce this was his fault.

"No, you're staying right here with Bruce. The rest of us will go." Natasha twisted her fingers with Clint's. "I have something I've been putting off. This is as good a time as any."

"I need to go to Malibu, do some work on JARVIS." Bruce wondered when the last time Tony had slept. "I want to give everyone some cash. We don't want SHIELD tracking us if we can help it."

"I don't have anywhere to go." The point of Steve's pencil snapped.

"Come with me. I could use some backup." Something was off with Natasha but Bruce didn't know her well enough to understand what.

"I will ask Heimdall to keep watch on all of you." Thor promised. "His gaze may protect us from further treachery."

Clint's phone rang and he stared at it blankly. "It's Fury."

"Answer it. Tell him we went to Portland." Natasha gave his hand a squeeze then let it go.

Clint hit the answer call button and got out of his chair. "Hello? Yes, sir. We flew into Erie and rented a car." Clint walked over to a tray of instruments and gave it a shake. "Natasha let me cry on her for a while and now we're packing up the kitchen. She says I have too much stuff." There was a pause and whatever Fury said made Clint tighten a hand into a fist. "I'm going to take this set to the Tower. Stark says he's making space for all of us." He picked up a roll of medical tape and tore off a strip. "Yes, sir, I promise."

When he hung up, Clint picked an empty vial from the blood draw kit and hurled it at the wall. "Son of a bitch. Acting like he's my friend, when he had my husband in sickbay while I packed up our whole life." Clint overturned the table, things flying everywhere.

Steve shot out of his chair and grabbed Clint. Considering how much stronger Steve was, he was making a pretty valiant effort to get away. He managed to kick over another tray of supplies as they struggled. "Clint, stop. You don't have to talk to him again, I promise."

"I should have shot him in the head when I had the chance. Why didn't I kill him?" It came out almost a sob and Clint stopped struggling and slumped in Steve's grip.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Suzanne from HR II

Summary: Everything is very lo-tech and Suzanne feels more like a spy than she has her entire career at SHIELD

Tony Stark called her burner phone two hours after she let Doctor Banner out of their repair facility. "I'm going to give you my credit card number. Whatever the doctor says he needs, order one."

"I appreciate your assistance, Mister Stark." Suzanne wrote the number down with a pencil, on paper, and felt like a caveman. "Doctor Vitale also appreciates it."

"Bruce says we need nurses."

"I'll take care of it." She'd found a phone book in her apartment building's lobby and called around. "I'll see you tomorrow, Mister Stark."

* * *

They put Stark's project number on Phil's wristband, which had previously been blank. Andrew capped his marker and shoved it back into his lab coat pocket. "I'm really sorry about all this, Phil, but I'm getting you out of here."

"Mister Stark will talk to Agent Barton tonight." She should have done it herself but after all the chaos since the battle for New York she didn't think she could take it. She also needed the deniability. Clint had proven himself capable of just about anything when pressed. "I'm hiring a staff to take care of him. If you could check in with them every few days and keep me in the loop I would appreciate it. I've got a medical transport coming for him but I don't know how we're going to get him through security without someone noticing."

"I've got it handled. I've been holding onto a few people for observation and I'm releasing them to civilian hospitals today." Andrew slid a few files under Phil's mattress. "Most of them are in rough shape, no one will notice one more banged up guy."

"Mrs. Coulson keeps calling and I keep ducking her. She called around to some of Phil's colleagues she knows and found out everyone else got bodies back. I got a message in all caps, something about how dare we do this to her son and she was going to get Clint a lawyer." There was a headache behind her right eye but it had gotten better since she'd gotten a hold of Bruce. "I need to talk to her, tell her something to diffuse the situation, but I can't figure out what on earth I could say."

"Why say anything? You didn't take your mandatory leave, I know you didn't. I'm throwing you off this boat as soon as we get my patients out of here safely." Andrew gave her a small smile. "Phil's mother lives in Erie. I'm sure a personal visit would smooth things over."

* * *

She flew to Erie with Tony Stark's credit card and rented a car. When she left the Coulson house a few hours later her blouse was stained with someone else's tears and Mrs. Coulson had a new burner cell phone.

She had the key to Agent Coulson's lake house in her pocket and nowhere to be for two days.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4: Marcus Johnson

Summary: How to lose friends and alienate superheroes.

Notes: My head canon is that 'Nick Fury' is a title. The Samuel L Jackson Fury is a guy who's real name is Marcus Johnson (Ala 616 Canon).

For the past few years, being Nick Fury had been exhausting. Ever since Stark had come back from Afghanistan, since Thor had dropped from the sky, he'd been less spymaster more circus ring master. Even during that crazy week back in the beginning he'd had Phil to keep him human, to call him Marcus and invite him over for a beer on Saturdays.

Nick Fury was supposed to be all knowing and all seeing and Marcus only had one eye so he'd borrowed other people's. Phil had been the first and the best. Doing this without him was going to be tough.

Six hours after the battle and sickbay was still a mess. The head doctor was sitting at his desk staring at a chart but he wasn't blinking. "Doctor Vitale."

The man startled and dropped the papers. "Sir! I need to-"

"I need Agent Coulson's wedding ring." He didn't have much time to get to Clint before someone else told him. The last anyone had seen the Avengers, they had gotten Bruce some clothes and gone out for shawarma but they'd come back sooner or later.

"His ring?"

"I need to go tell Clint his husband is dead. Get me his god damn ring."

"Sir-"

"Now! No questions, no stalling. Get me the ring. I don't care if you have to cut it off but I need it now." His head was pounding from the stims he'd taken and somewhere on board his assistant director was talking to the World Security Council and his best friend was on a slab.

"Yes, sir." Doctor Vitale signed the paper he'd been staring at and handed it over. It was Phil's death certificate. "No questions. I'll get you the ring."

* * *

They'd gone back to Stark's place to get drunk after dinner. That was where he found them.

Clint didn't get drunk, as a general rule. Neither did Bruce Banner, if you believed his records. By the time Marcus got to them, the whole team minus Rogers was shit faced and even Rogers was doing his best. "This stuff tastes like paint stripper, Stark. There was a guy in my building who went blind from bad booze. I bet it was this stuff."

"Just drink it. If that doesn't work, I'll go get the lab-grade stuff from the basement." Stark was behind his bar pouring fresh shots of whiskey. "Well, look who finally decided to show up."

"Careful with that whiskey." Marcus took stock of the team. They were all ambulatory and someone had bandaged Roger's stomach wound. "Anyone stitch you up, Captain?"

"Yes, sir." Rogers was drinking directly from the bottle of whatever Stark had given him and he took another swig.

"Are you alone, sir? Don't tell me you've got Phil doing paperwork already." Clint was draped across Natasha, picking glass out of his discarded body armor with a pair of tweezers. "I need to send a gift basket to the materials guys. This stuff worked great."

"Clint." He couldn't bring himself to say it. He just reached into his pocket and took out the ring, set it down on the table. "I'm sorry."

Clint sat up and grabbed the ring. "Did I…"

"No." He wasn't going to let Clint blame himself for this. They were going to have enough problems.

"I need to see him." Clint staggered to his feet. "Nat, please, I need a ride."

"Right..." Tony drew the word out. "Because cellists have bows." He picked up the phone by the bar. "Happy, we need a ride. No, a helicopter."

* * *

Clint was ambulatory by the time they landed on the deck of the carrier. "Do you need me to come to Medical, keep them from admitting you?"

"No, sir." Clint's hand was still clenched tight around the ring. "Natasha will come with me."

"Gentlemen." He couldn't let them all barge into medical. "Come with me. We need to debrief."

He stuck them in a conference room that was mostly intact. "First of all, you people are some of the craziest motherfuckers I have ever seen."

Stark was slouching in his chair, hiding behind his dark sunglasses. "I resent that. We just saved-"

"You rode a nuclear bomb into outer space. You are not Major Kong, this is not Doctor Strangelove. In the future, throw the damn thing." When Stark had first pulled his 'I am Iron Man' thing, Marcus had been worried about an aneurysm but in the time since then he thought he'd developed an immunity to Stark's heroics. He'd been wrong. "Captain, you took off your cowl in the middle of downtown Manhattan after I personally explained to you that nearly every American now carries a camera on them at all times. Some of the women who toured with you in the SSO are still alive, they're were on CNN this morning insisting that you're Steve Rogers."

"Sir-"

"One of them keeps talking about how good you still look in tights, Captain. I am up to my ass in interview requests." He turned his gaze to Thor and Banner. "I'm not sure how, considering how much property damage the two of you do, but you both managed to get through the battle without creating any major headaches for me. Congratulations."

"Thank you?" Banner was looking around nervously, as if he expected the military to burst in at any moment.

"I regret then, Fury, that I must cause you difficulties but the Tesseract and my brother must both be returned to Asgard as soon as possible." Someone had convinced Thor to take his armor off but he still looked like someone from medieval Europe.

The IOC wouldn't like that but there was no where on Earth they could secure Loki, no place he could trust leaving the Tesseract after this whole incident. "You can have them. Get your brother off my planet and lock up your toys, by all means. Any other WMD's your Dad happened to leave lying around?"

Natasha pushed the door open. "They already burned all the bodies. Did you sign off on that?"

"This is the first I've heard about it." It had probably come down from the WSC. There was going to hell to pay from the families though, and HR was going to be riding his ass for weeks.

"Can they do that?" Roger got to his feet.

"No." If he let Rogers loose on medical, he could probably extract Barton without too much fuss.

"Let's go make some threats, see if we can get his personal effects at least." Stark put his sunglasses in his pocket and followed Rogers out of the room.

* * *

There was a meeting request from HR in his email. He ignored it, and the next one and the next one. If the WSC had ordered medical to burn the bodies, there was nothing he could do about it. It was her job to deal with bereaved families, he couldn't look Phil's mother in the face and tell her not only had he gotten her son killed but they'd cremated him. She might shoot him, or worse she might cry. There was too much to do, he didn't even have to work very hard to avoid HR's attention.

When they'd done all the repairs they could in the air, the Carrier made landfall in New Jersey. Medical kicked everyone out for 48 hours before they all started having psychotic breaks so he caught the train home.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd been in his apartment but SHIELD sent someone to air things out every few days and normally there was food in the fridge but not tonight.

He booted up his computer and tried to order a pizza but his credit card kept getting declined. When he walked into a fast food place, they rejected it too. He dug the emergency twenty out from behind his license and took home a bag of grease. He put something mindless on the TV so he'd have something to talk to Phil about on Monday and then he remembered they wouldn't be talking about shitty reality tv anymore.

He shut it off and listened to the radio instead and ate his burger in a mostly dark apartment. The next day he tried to use his ATM card but the machine ate his card and it was Saturday so the branch had closed at noon.

He called Clint around two in the afternoon. "Where are you?"

"Home." He doesn't sound drunk, that was good. "Sitting on the roof."

That was actually pretty normal for Clint, but it was still a little worrisome. "They didn't stock my fridge."

"Oh." He could hear some shuffling on the other end of the line. "Is no one delivering in your part of the city? I swear I saw some metahuman scaling a building carrying a pizza."

"None of my plastic is working." There was a safe in his apartment with cash in it but he wanted an excuse to check on Clint.

"I'm making pork stir fry. There's going to be extra." Clint and Phil's freezer was full of carefully vacuum sealed packages, all portioned for two. It was the only way to stop Clint from cooking for an army but right now it was just sad.

"I'll be over at five."

* * *

Clint pulled the pot out of the rice cooker and set it on the table next to the wok. He sat down at his place and just sort of stared at the food. "Emma called me. She wants to come visit."

"You let me know when she's here. I'll head for international waters." Emma Coulson terrified him, deeply. Marcus put food on his plate and started eating. Clint seemed to realize he was supposed to eat and followed suit. "Was Stark able to get you Phil's things?"

"Yeah." Clint poked at a piece of meat. "Sir, did you have to? The cards, I mean."

"To put Rogers and Stark over the edge, yes, I did need to." It was his blood on the cards, not Phil's. It had been hard to ruin them, he'd know what they meant to Phil. "I used the ones he kept talking about replacing. He would have found a way to kill me beyond the grave otherwise."

"I didn't tell them." Clint was folding his rice into the meat and vegetable so he would have something to do with his hands. "Cap gave them to me, told me the line you'd given them. If I hadn't been so fucked up, I think I would have laughed in his face. Phil carrying around his investment pieces in his pocket, during a battle? I made him sign them all, even the bloody ones."

"Good." Phil would have liked that, for sentimental reasons and the value it added to his collection.

"Phil wanted you to have something." Clint went over to their wall of media and pulled down a disk. It was a copy of the first Men In Black movie. "I've got a whole list of shit I'm supposed to give away but no one else has come to check on me, other than Natasha."

Marcus put the case in his coat. "You ever see him pull the Agent K act on Stark?"

"Only on surveillance video." Clint sat back down and actually put some food in his mouth. "Do we have an ETA for getting rid of Loki? Nat and I may leave town."

"You going to Portland?" There was ice water in a jug and he poured himself some. Clint had a heavy hand with the sriracha sauce.

"I don't want the house, not if it's just me. We never even made it out there this year." Their lake house was clear on the other side of the state and they'd been at the PEGASUS facility for months before Loki had come through. "Sir, what the hell am I supposed to do now?"

"I don't know, but if you figure it out, let me know."

* * *

When he made it to the bank Monday morning, the teller was very sorry but someone reported his card stolen and they would need two forms of ID before he could get a new one. He had two forms of ID, but one of them was Nick Fury's and that wasn't going to help anyone. American Express was similarly sorry, but he couldn't remember the answers to their security questions.

His landlord called and said the automatic transfer of his rent hadn't gone through and he was going to have to pay a late fee, if he could find his checkbook. His cable stopped working on Tuesday, someone had called the cable company and cancelled his account. They wouldn't turn it back on unless he paid last month's bill, which had also failed to be auto paid.

He called Clint's cell. "You two get out of town okay?"

"Yes, sir. We flew into Erie and rented a car. Natasha let me cry on her for a while and now we're packing up the kitchen." There was a metallic clatter on Clint's end of the line. "She says I have too much stuff."

Clint's cards were working, at least. "You own two sets of all-clad cookware and Chicago Metallics baking pans." He didn't have much else, but Clint bought cookware the way Coulson bought Captain America merchandise: Only the best but it was everywhere you looked in their apartment.

"I'm going to take this set to the Tower. Stark says he's making space for all of us."

Marcus could hear the sound of tape coming off the roll. "Don't kill him. I can't afford any more incidents this year."

* * *

On Wednesday, he was finally allowed to go back to work. Two day stand-down his ass. The Carrier was still in dry dock but her engines looked a lot better. He found Maria on the bridge. "Any trouble?"

"No, sir. Fabrication completed on the specs Thor provided, his brother is muzzled and the…" Maria struggled to find the ring word. "Teleport modulator? Whatever we're calling it. It's ready when we are."

"Good. Contact Stark, tell him we have a go for Friday. If he's not willing to share the rest of the team's location, he can collect them himself." He didn't mention the handprint her little girl had left on the back of her jacket. So, it was just him. It was that woman in HR, he knew it. Well, he was Nick Fury. He wasn't going to let some paper pusher get to him, no matter how many grieving families she had screaming at her. He'd figure out how to pay his own damn rent. As soon as he found his check book.


	5. Chapter 5

Pepper Potts

Summary: Pepper won't stand for this.

Loving Tony Stark was hard. Not because he was a bad man but because he'd become a good one. There was a missed call on her phone when her plane had touched down and she'd been so sure he was dead until it rang. She'd been staring at the screen for so long it startled her but she answered it. "Tony?"

"Hey, Pep. So, we went to get some food and then I thought I'd bring everyone by to meet you but you're not here yet."

"You fell out of the sky. I saw it on TV." The choppers hadn't been able to follow him down the whole way. "How are you alive?"

"The Hulk caught me. We're keeping him, by the way. I may have promised him some lab space-"

"You cannot keep the Hulk in Manhattan and you are not performing experiments on him." When had her life gotten so crazy? When had she started to have to say things like that?

"You are not going to believe me until you see him. We're in the penthouse. What's left of it. Come say hi. Natalie Rushman is here, only she's Natasha Romanoff now." Tony's voice got farther way for a second. "Everyone say hello to Pepper."

A chorus of voices said hello but none of them were familiar except for Natalie's, or Natasha's or whoever she was. "Where's Agent Coulson? I want to talk to him." Tony didn't answer and her stomach dropped. "Tony? I'm on my way."

Of course, by the time she made her way to the Tower, they had all hared off somewhere. There was a note with her name on it set on top of a pile of rubble but JARVIS let her know they'd gone to retrieve Agent Coulson's body.

They came back hours later, whatever post battle adrenaline they'd had long worn off and looking like they might all collapse. "Clint?" She recognized him from the picture in Phil's wallet.

"Ms. Potts." He looked like death warmed over and collapsed into a chair. "This has been the worst day of my life."

There was a man she didn't recognize with the team and he was wearing Tony's clothes. "If I got you tea, would you drink it?"

"He'll drink it." Natasha pressed a hand to the back of Clint's neck. "Lots of sugar, he needs it."

"Kitchen's through there, Bruce." Tony was out of his armour and he was covered in bruises. "Hi."

"Hi." She wrapped her arms around him and closed her eyes. "So, that was terrifying. Let's not do it again any time soon." The stranger was puttering around their kitchen, going through the cupboards. Tony had called him Bruce, hadn't he? "Is that Bruce Banner?" She gave Tony a last squeeze and went to say hello. "Doctor Banner. I'm Virginia Potts. We met at a conference a few years ago."

"Oh." He tucked a box of tea into one elbow and shook her hand. "Right. That seems like a lifetime ago." The electric kettle she didn't know they had reached boil and clicked off. He grabbed a few mugs and started pouring tea. "Excuse me."

He went back into the living room and foisted a mug on Clint, who just stared at it numbly.

She grabbed Tony by the arm and pulled him into the kitchen. "Where did you find him?"

"Who?"

Fair point. Their living room was full of formerly missing persons. "Doctor Banner. The man was at the cutting edge of medical research and then he just vanished. He was convinced he'd found a way to reduce the harmful effect of radiation on human cells. The impact on cancer treatment alone…" She'd tried to offer him a job then but the military had apparently owned his research, if not his soul. "Where has he been?"

"India? That's where SHIELD found him."

"Tell me you made him a job offer." They could lure someone away from SHIELD, she was sure of it. "I'm sure you can get him a better lab than SHIELD can. Even if-"

"Pepper." Tony looked like he was about to burst out laughing. "Yes, I made him a job offer." The smile went away, suddenly. "Agent Coulson is dead. We had to make all sort of threats just to get Clint the contents of his pockets."

Her first instinct was to call Phil, to get his help, but that wasn't possible anymore. The only thing she could do was talk to Clint Barton, who she felt like she knew from Phil's stories but she'd never actually met. One last thing occurred to her before she went back into the living room. "Tony, where did you stash the Hulk?"

Her voice must have carried because Bruce choked on his tea. Tony's smile was back. "Yeah, about that. So, Bruce's treatment protocols worked. He is now totally resistant to harmful radiation."

* * *

"You would think that at some point, I would stop making the same mistakes. JARVIS, I need privacy mode." Tony had appeared in the doorway to her bedroom just after dinner time, after being holed up with Bruce all day. " I need one of the residence floors taken off the grid. We have another guest moving in."

"A guest you're hiding from…" She could only imagine who Tony was bringing in. She'd caught him discussing their team with Steve. They wanted another eye in the sky, preferably someone who could fly. Apparently, what Thor did with his hammer didn't count.

"Everyone." Tony slid a piece of paper onto her nightstand. "I could use your help on this."

She unfolded the paper and took a deep breath. All it said was, 'Phil's alive.'

"There aren't many people I can trust but you're my everything, Pepper. I've already made all the arrangements to bring him here." He took the slip of paper from her and put it into his pants. "Someone at SHIELD is helping us but I could be bringing all sorts of trouble home when I do this."

"I don't care." She was so angry it took her a minute to realize he'd taken JARVIS offline before they had started talking. "Phil's overrides. We have to find them all."

"I know." He crawled into bed beside her. "I can't shut him down. I can't."

JARVIS was just to Tony but to her. "We'll figure it out. We'll get code sniffers to look at him tomorrow." Tony curled against her side and put his head on her chest. He slept, but she couldn't. She would have to pull their entire coding department off task to go over JARVIS's code but there were a few backdoors she'd known about. She made a list so they could close them first. She made a list of people she'd hired on Phil's say-so and arranged to have them shipped off to assignments somewhere remote. She found recommendations for physical therapists and massage therapists.

When the sun rose, she got out of bed and started her day. She hadn't slept at all.

* * *

Phil looked better than she had expected. Clint looked worse. "They experimented on him, the medical team. I owe Doctor Vitale a beer. Or a hundred."

"I'll see what I can do discreetly." Pepper pulled up a chair next to his. "They're ready to move Loki offworld."

"Nat and I have it all planned out." Clint took one of Phil's hands in his. "She and I will drive off together. I'll switch places with the Captain and come back to the Tower with his cycle. It shouldn't take more than a couple hours. When you and Stark go back to California, I'll stay here with Banner and Phil."

He sounded unsure, like the thought of leaving for even that long was killing him. "I'll stay with him, while you're gone."

"Thank you."

* * *

By the time Tony got their Malibu place blown up, she was ready to call the entire year a disaster and crawl under the covers till New Years. Then SHIELD showed up at her hotel room. "Miss Potts, I'm Agent Blake. SHIELD would like to-"

"SHIELD can go fuck itself." Tony might be dead, one of his old hookups was in her hotel room with her and all she wanted was for this to be over.

When she tried to shut the door, he stuck his hand in the door jam. She would have to break his fingers to get it shut. "You've always had a cordial relationship with SHIELD. Mr. Stark has gotten himself into quite the situation, I'd like to help."

"I've always had a cordial relationship with Agent Coulson. I have no interest in dealing with SHIELD, you can ask Nick Fury why." She tried to shut the door again and he yanked his fingers back at the last minute.

"Miss Potts?" He called to her through the closed door.

"We're not interested. If I see any sign of SHIELD interfering in this, I will have you taken down."

When Maya Hansen fell asleep she dialed New York. "Pepper?"

"Bruce." She shut the bathroom door and locked it. "Tell me something good."

"I'm high? I'm considering sedating my roommates?"

"I could use some sedating. How's Phil doing?" She needed something positive to hold on to, just until she heard from Tony. She knew he wasn't dead but it got worse and worse every time he did this.

"Climbing the walls and that was before Tony's stunt. Clint's been trying to keep him occupied but Phil's used to running the show. I would like roommates who are not used to fighting super-human threats."

"I'm glad he's in good enough shape to be a bother." She turned on the shower. "They blew up our house."

"It was pretty stupid of Tony to give out your home address."

"You're telling me." She adjusted the water as hot as she could stand it. "Have you heard from Steve and Natasha?"

"I got a text message from Steve asking if they should come in. What do you want me to tell them?"

She thought of the fire power they'd brought to bear on the house and what killing an American icon like Steve Rogers would do for the Ten Rings. "No, don't let him or Natasha anywhere near this. Hold Phil over Clint's head if you need to. If it comes down to it and we need help, it has to be you. No one else could go toe to toe with this level of fire power."

"Just let me know and I'll get on a plane."

"Thank you, Bruce." She hung up and got in the shower.

Of course, by the time shit really hit the fan, it was too late to call Bruce and she ended up a science experiment herself.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Marcus Johnson II

Notes: For more information about Transhumanism and the 're-sleeving' of minds in synthetic bodies check out the Takeshi Kovacs novels, as well as Eclipse Phase. It's an RPG but the majority of the information is written in a mission report style and it's very readable.

When a good man went to war, demons ran. When HR went to war, eventually even Nick Fury had to give in.

By Christmas, it had become clear Marcus Johnson was never going to get another credit card or checking account. "I shouldn't have done it."

She didn't even look away from her computer screen. "Done what, Director?"

"I should have met with you. I should have met with Emma Coulson, talked her out of sueing us." He wasn't going to say he was sorry, Nick Fury didn't apologize, but he could make some concessions.

"Mrs. Coulson will not be pursuing a lawsuit against us." Her fingers flew across the keyboard. No one was this busy, to not stop working when the big boss arrived. She was still pissed. "I visited her personally."

"Thank you. For cleaning up my mess." He picked up one of the knick knacks off her desk and wondered if she's show some human reaction if he threw it at her monitor or if she'd just keep typing. "I would like my cover identity back, Suzanne. What do I have to do to make that happen?"

She finally looked at him. He could see the anger in her eyes. "If you want Marcus Johnson back, fill out the paperwork on the web portal and send it to my assistant."

"That takes weeks. You could have it done tomorrow." What had Emma said to her? What had she had to say to Emma?

"I'm not interested in making your life any easier right now." She stared at him like he was something disgusting she'd found on the bottom of her shoe. "We have procedures in place, you'll need to follow them like everyone else. If you'll excuse me, Director, I have a lot of work to do. We've got a new batch of Agents to process."

He left her office, a vague sense of wrongness creeping up his spine. That was not a normal reaction to his avoiding a few meetings. Was she blaming him for losing Barton and Romanoff? They'd pushed everyone up a slot on the roster but even Ward was no substitute for their dream team sniper and spy.

He'd expected Barton to call him every once in a while but there had been nothing, not even a drunk call from an anonymous number. Nick Fury didn't have any friends but Clint had married the man who was practically Marcus' brother. You didn't just cut out family like this.

His desk phone rang. "What?"

"Sir, I believe Tony Stark has lost his mind."

"Tell me something new, Agent Hill."

"He's given out his home address on national television."

Oh, wonderful. The Stark headache was back. He was going to need to get Phil on a plane and… No, that wasn't going to work. "Send Blake out there. Tell him to be *very* nice to Pepper Potts. He'll need to go through her to get to Stark."

* * *

Blake called from California with bad news. "Miss Potts requests SHIELD not involve ourselves at this time, sir."

"What?" Marcus had seen the news. Their house had fallen into the ocean.

"She told me she would only deal with Agent Coulson, which puts me in a tight spot, sir. Unless we've developed the ability to raise the dead and no one told me."

Marcus had given Blake the upstep to Level 7 based on a recommendation from Phil, back when they'd thought he would be heading up the Avengers Initiative. If the man's own hand-picked successor wasn't good enough for Potts, who else could he send? "Have you spoken to Colonel Rhodes?"

"Colonel Rhodes won't take my calls. No one wants us here, sir."

"Come home." He was losing control of this situation. This was Suzanne's fault, somehow, although he wasn't sure how she could have poisoned SHIELD's relationship with Stark Industries and the military.

He hung up and locked the door to his office got a cup of coffee and talked to his ceiling. "Alright, Phil. You told me once that no one is irreplaceable but you're putting me in a hell of a bind here. I may have misunderstood Barton and Romanov's commitment to this agency versus their commitment to you. We seem to have lost Stark's loyalties. No one has seen any of the others in months. So help me out here. What am I supposed to do?"

There was no answer. He had escalating threats all over the globe and not enough hands. Phil had known everyone and he remembered everything, down to what his contacts took in their coffee. How many doors were going to be closed to them without Phil?

* * *

It was Dr. Streiten's idea and Marcus should have turned him down flat but he'd spent half an hour that morning wondering why Phil was late for their meeting before he remembered he met with Blake in the afternoon.

"Have you read much science fiction, Director?"

"I live science fiction, Doctor. I don't need more of it in my limited spare time."

Streiten turned on the holographic display in his office. "One of my favorite parts of science fiction is the concept of transhumanism, that we can use technology to alter the human condition. Tony Stark's arc reactor is one example. JARVIS is another one. A true artificial intelligence, who can think and act on his own will. I've heard rumors that the Life Model Decoy project was started to give JARVIS a body."

"It's true." There had been a lawsuit, ten years ago maybe, where Stark Enterprises had fought and won JARVIS the rights of personhood and it had all been in the court files. "Guy didn't want a body and California decided he didn't need one to be considered alive. That's why Stark started licensing out the LMDs."

"The LMDs are toys for rich people with paranoia problems. They look human, feel human, even to a doctor but they're not perfect copies of the people they're impersonating. They don't have to be. But if Stark designed them to hold JARVIS then their systems are capable of containing a human mind."

It took Marcus a minute to see where he was going with this. "You think you could put a person inside an LMD?"

"We were exploring the concept last year. We'd fully mapped a handful of subjects and backed up their minds. In our experiments when we loaded them in LMDs based off their own bodies, they provided nearly identical responses to memory and cognition tests. All those agents are dead now, lost at PEGASUS or in the Battle for New York. We could bring them back."

He had to ask, had to know. "Who do you have copies of?"

"They're not copies. They're backups." Streiten pulled up a list on his computer and turned the screen so Marcus could see it. "We lost so many people to Loki. If we could save even a few, don't we have an obligation to try?"

At the top of the list was 'Phillip J. Coulson' and Marcus had to look away.

* * *

Marcus was pretty sure it was a sign of mental instability that he was even considering this. When Clint Barton ever found out, he was a dead man, no questions asked.

He brought it to Hill, there was no one else he could trust. She read the doctors notes all the way through then looked at the subject list. "What, exactly, are you asking me, sir?"

"I am contemplating an extreme course of action, Hill. I need someone to sanity check me." What was unspoken was that usually that sanity check came from Phil and that was the problem here.

"The men we lost at PEGASUS were some of our best. If they were all we lost, we couldn't have afforded it." She turned off the screen of the tablet and slid it across the desk. "I am not objective here, Director. Agent Coulson was one of my friends too. If what you're bringing back is really him, you should do it."

* * *

It took them a few weeks to build a new body for Phil, to reconstruct his memories between his last backup and the battle on the carrier from security camera footage. It would never be as good as the backups but trauma did that to a mind, Phil would probably never notice.

They dummied up medical records for a treatment protocol, what they would have done if Phil had made it to the operating table. It would explain away any small differences he felt in his new body. They'd run some kind of VR to make up for the missing time, it was all beyond Marcus's understanding.

What he did know was the Avengers would never forgive him, the apparent betrayal was too big. He'd take the fall for it though, in a heartbeat. Clint would probably come around, at least. They would have Phil back, that was the important part.

The body was on a medical table, still waiting for the upload but Marcus felt less strange talking to an empty shell than he did thin air. "The story is, we pumped you full of everything we had, did some experimental treatments. That will cover the fact that you're bad elbow is brand new and why your back won't hurt when you slouch anymore. Any thing else works differently, you and Clint have to work that out on your own."

They'd replicated all his scars, plus the new one on his chest. Marcus pushed out of his chair and gave Phil's shoulder a squeeze. "You owe me, Cheese. I'm bringing you back from the dead."

Doctor Streiten was waiting outside. "Do we have a go?"

"Bring our people back."

Marcus strode out of medical looking as sure of himself as ever but when he got back to his office he sat in the dark and poured himself a drink. An hour later, someone knocked on his door. "Unless it's an alien invasion, go away."

"No aliens, sir, just me." It smiled like Phil, leaned in the doorway like Phil. "Now that they've let me out of jail-"

"Medical leave, Phil. You were on medical leave." A tropical vacation, the best fake recovery time their programs could manage.

It shrugged and took a seat across from Marcus, poured itself a drink. "I'm back now, and we need to talk. Where is Clint?"

"Phil-"

"Did you arrest him? The doctors kept telling me he was fine, but you and I both know that's bullshit, sir. If he was fine, he would have been with me." It rubbed at it's scar. "Did you give him up? Is he in a cell somewhere? Did they execute him?"

"No." It was exactly what Phil would have asked him. It made it worse, somehow, made him feel sick. He took another sip of whiskey. "He took off before I could tell him you were alive. Romanoff must have helped him go off the grid because we can't find the guy no matter how hard we look."

"For the record, sir? You're an asshole. The avenging story was for Stark and Rogers. My mind-raped husband did not need a push." It stared at him, anger in it's eyes. "I will find him and you will apologize for lying to him and whatever else manipulating crap you pulled while I was unconscious in a hospital bed. Alone."

This had been a terrible mistake. It was perfect, if he hadn't seen it lying there inactive he would really believe it was Phil. "You find him and I'll tell him anything you want."

"Sir…" Whatever it was about to say, it changed it's mind. "Marcus. Thank you. For not letting me go. I went into that room ready to die because I thought he was gone, but if he's out there, alive, I'll find him. That's enough to keep me going."

* * *

It ate lunch with Hill, jogged with Sitwell. Blake was the happiest man on Earth, to not be in a dead man's shadow any more.

It was Maria who solved it for him. "We've got to put that man back to work. The analyst pen is starting to get twitchy."

"That's not Phil." He wasn't quite drunk, but he wanted to be.

"It is." Hill poked the empty bottle with a finger. "In every way that matters, it is Agent Coulson. If you talk to him-"

"I want it off my boat." He had talked to it, for as long as he could stand it. It said all the right things, knew all the right jokes, the right stories, but it was a fake, and he couldn't ever forget that.

"Director, Phil is not an it and we need him. All hell is breaking loose out there, sir. You don't even want to know how Sitwell recruited our newest engineer. Agent Coulson is the best of the best. If you don't want him," and Maria's tone made sure he knew she thought it was ludicrous, "Then I'll take him."

She gave it a plane, a 90's style mobile command center, and Phil's car. Marcus swallowed acid, because the car should have been Clint's, and signed all the papers.

It must have known something was wrong when he wouldn't eat with it, have a beer with it, but it never said anything because Maria was piling the work on, it didn't have time to be social. It started doing the legwork to assemble a team and when it wasn't doing that it was at it's desk late into the night, using SHIELD resources to search for Clint.

Marcus would have to find him first.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7: Phil Coulson (Alpha Fork)

Summary: It's hard being the one left behind.

Notes: Thank you to every one who is reading ! The response to this fic is a bright spot in an otherwise challenging few weeks. I hope I won't be breaking too many hearts by the time this is all over...

Fall 2013

Being in Tahiti was like being in jail. They wouldn't give him a phone, won't tell him anything that happened. He spent the first few months drifting in and out of consciousness but after that it was all PT and OT and massage therapists breaking up scar tissue. That hurt, but it wasn't the worst pain. He spent the first four months thinking Clint was dead.

It's only when he made it back to New York that he finally got his hands on the footage. He sat down in his office and made himself watch the video. When he saw the first arrow fly, he almost wept. Natasha had brought him in, hee hadn't died on the carrier. Phil took in deep shaky breaths as they all fought together. He had done that, his sacrifice had done that. He had made the Avengers a team.

By the end, he could barely breath but Clint had been standing there at the very end, with everyone else. He waited until the shaking stopped and got to his feet. He had to talk to Fury.

* * *

Fury hadn't had any answers to give him but the video had given him an idea. "Andrew."

The man's head shot up. "Agent Coulson! What… what are you doing here?"

"The rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated." He pulled a chair over and sat down. "I was hoping you could help me with something. You were one of the last people to see Agent Barton before he left SHIELD."

"Phil…" Andrew looked around, uncomfortable. "I don't understand what's going on."

"Fury told everyone I was dead and Clint came to you to see the body." Phil gave him a half smile, trying not to look like a man who hadn't slept in days. "I need to know what he said to you."

Andrew stood suddenly. "I'm sorry, sir. I don't think I'm going to be able to help you. Agent Barton was very upset, he didn't say very much."

"Andrew?" Phil watched the man practically run out of the room. He wasn't the first person to have that reaction but he'd been the worst at hiding it.

* * *

He didn't seem to need as much sleep as he used to and there was nothing to go home to, not with Clint gone. He spent long days researching for the Intelligence department and long nights on the computer, combing surveillance video looking for Clint.

There was nothing to distract him. He had an empty apartment, his husband was on the run and he'd taken Natasha with him. Marcus wouldn't spend time with him anymore. Maybe he decided friends were a liability or he was pissed Phil had gotten himself hurt but either way, the weekend beers and conversations about bad tv were gone.

Maria and Jasper did their best, but it wasn't the same. "I can't keep sitting here."

"I can't let you keep sitting here." Maria was smiling. "We expended a lot of resources getting you back in fighting form, Phil. I need you back out there. Things are getting out of control. There wasn't enough information management in the world to put the genie back in the bottle after New York. I want you to assemble a team."

"I had a team." It just slipped out. He shouldn't have said anything because Maria looked sad for him and he didn't need her pity. "What kind of team?"

"What you do best, Phil, contain the weirdness. We've got weird shit happening in record amounts, all over the globe. There's Chitauri tech all over the city and god only knows what AIM left lying around."

There was work to do. That was something at least.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Phil Coulson

Summary: When I went to sleep, I had collected all the original Avengers. I've only got a partial set here.

Notes: This chapter begins a year before the previous chapter. If you can, don't think of this Phil as the *real* one. They are both Phil Coulson. That's what makes it worse.

Fall 2012

He woke slowly. His chest hurt. There was a woman's voice, no one he recognized. "Sir, can you hear me? Clint, take his hand."

He felt Clint's calloused hand grip his, but that was impossible. Clint was dead.

"Phil, please. Please open your eyes."

It was Clint's voice. Phil had to know for sure, he opened his eyes. When he tried to say his name, nothing came out. "Stacey, can you get Phil some ice chips then get the doctor?"

The woman was wearing hospital scrub was and she was smiling. "Of course."

When the ice melted on his mouth, he murmured, "Clint." and squeezed the hand still holding his.

"It's so good to see your eyes again, Phil." Clint didn't sit as much as collapse in his chair.

"You're alive." Natasha had done it, then. Somehow, she had brought him in without killing him.

"I'm alive. And so are you." Clint pressed a kiss to his knuckles. "We won. Saved the whole damn world, sent Loki back to Asgard in chains."

"Good job." It was a better ending than he'd had any right to hope for. "Where are we?" It wasn't a hospital, the smell was wrong. No industrial cleaners.

"Stark Tower." The door shut quietly behind Bruce Banner. "Agent Coulson, I'm glad you finally decided to wake up."

Banner's qualification were eclectic. He'd done a dual MD/PHD that made him uniquely qualified to work on the super soldier serum but as far as Phil knew he'd never been licensed, never practiced medicine outside of third world slums. He certainly wasn't the doctor Phil had been expecting. "Why am I here? Did we lose the carrier?" It would have been a terrible loss, Marcus must have lost his mind. Phil tried to sit up.

"Don't do that." Bruce put his hand on Phil's shoulder and gave him a gentle shove back down. "I want to get Doctor Vitale on the line for a consult before I let you out of bed. He put you back together using half a dozen medical technologies I've never heard of, we're not sure how healed up you actually are."

"Did Stark kidnap me?" Clint was looking at his shoes. "Clint. Did Stark steal me out SHIELD medical?"

"Technically," Bruce was typing something into his cellphone. "I'm the one who got you out of SHIELD medical. We weren't going to abandon you, after what you did for us."

"I wasn't abandoned. SHIELD takes very good care of it's assets." Phil reached out and tipped Clint's chin up. "You're angry at me for getting hurt. I'm-"

"Fury told me you were dead." Clint was tearing up. He pulled far enough way to get a chain out from under his shirt and took the ring off it. "This is yours."

It fit a little loosely but it was back where it belonged, they could deal with the rest later. "He never would let an opportunity like that go. Give me your phone, Clint. I want to call in. How long have I been out?"

"It's September." Clint took Phil's hands in his again. "And you can't call Fury."

"I feel fine." Stiff and weak, but his chest hardly hurt at all. He'd been in this bed for months and whatever they'd done to him to keep him alive seemed like it had done the job. "I promise, I'll take a few more weeks of leave but-"

"Phil, he told me you were dead." Clint's hands had tightened on his almost painfully. "After the battle, he pulled your ring off your finger, came to me at Stark Tower and gave it to me. When I went to medical, they told me they'd burned your body. We would never have known you were alive if HR hadn't contacted Bruce."

"Clint, I need some blood flow into my hands." Clint let his grip up a little, but he was shaking his head. Phil tried a different tact. "I'll make him apologize and explain whatever game he's been playing."

"Agent Coulson," Bruce sat down on the other side of the bed. "You're right, we *stole* you out of SHIELD medical three months ago. No one has come looking for you, even though this is the first place anyone with any sense would look."

"You're wrong."

* * *

They weren't wrong.

He convinced them to let him move to a couch in a room with a TV and Phil spent the next fews days watching video footage. He fast forwarded through days of footage. After Marcus took his wedding ring, he'd never come back to sickbay. It had been a woman from HR who had contacted the Avengers and Doctor Vitale who had gotten him out. No one even seemed to care he was gone.

Clint had sat beside him the whole time, even though Phil could tell he was boiling with rage. "I made him dinner, the night they got you out. He had me completely fooled, he seemed ripped open by what happened to you. I know he's your friend, but this… Phil, I was going to bury an empty casket and I would never have known you were rotting away as a John Doe in some hospital."

"I think my friend's been gone a long time." Phil reached inside his shirt and touched his scar. He'd gone into that room ready to die if it gave everyone just a few more minutes."What happened to the Avengers? Why is it just you and Doctor Banner here?"

"I'm not here. I vanished with Natasha." Every time Phil touched his scar, Clint looked away. "But really? We split up. I swapped out of Nat's car with Steve, they're on some kind of ghost hunt. Thor took his brother home in chains, Tony's in Malibu going over JARVIS with a fine toothed comb."

"I want to make some phone calls tomorrow." He was tired. Nothing hurt, exactly, Andrew had gone above and beyond and three months had gotten him a lot of healing but he'd been laid up for a long time. "Lay down with me?"

"There's is nothing else in the universe I would rather be doing now."

Stark had apparently promised them a whole floor some time in the future but for now they were sleeping in the room Clint had been using on the lockdown floor. It had a big bed, which Clint had been using as little as possible, but Phil appreciated it's existence.

Clint couldn't seem to stop touching him. They stretched out next to each other and laid there in the dark, Clint's hands everywhere. Eventually, he slid his hand under Phil's shirt up to his heart, to his scar. "Do you remember a few years ago, when you first pitched this whole super team to me? You told me you'd be running it."

"Dead men don't supervise superheroes." Phil tugged Clint a little closer, so they were pressed together, side to side.

"We won't work for SHIELD, but Thor was right, about higher war. The world needs heroes." Clint buried his head in the crook of Phil's neck. "And heroes need guidance. This little team was always meant to be the first wave."

He soaked up the feeling of just laying there, with Clint. He thought he'd never have this again. "And this has nothing to do with my tendency to do nothing but watch bad tv when I'm laid up?"

"Almost nothing." Clint's hand slid down from Phil's chest to the waistband of his pants. "I don't think I've thanked you yet, for not having me killed and for not actually being dead."

"I could say the same to you." Clint's mouth tasted the same. He would have to investigate the rest of him.

* * *

"You're going to need a lot of PT to get back into shape." Andrew snapped off his gloves and threw them into the trash. "Otherwise, you look good. Heart is in near perfect condition. I wasn't expecting you to sleep so long but honestly, I threw everything in our research files at you. Something worked but it took a lot out of you."

"I've got nothing but time." Phil buttoned his shirt back up. "Thank you, Andrew. I know you took a big risk for me."

"That was nothing. I wasn't going to let Fury bury you." Andrew slid a tablet out of his bag. "This, though? Taking this was a risk."

Phil flicked the tablet on. It was data on SHIELD's recovery from the battle for New York. It was not going particularly well. "Things are escalating. Who does Fury have running his ops?"

"Blake got his step to level 7 but Fury didn't replace you, he's got Hill doing the coordinating." Andrew zipped his bag shut and got to his feet. "Take care of yourself, Phil. The whole world seems to be on fire lately."

* * *

Clint was asleep beside him and it was painfully early on the West Coast, but he called Pepper anyway. "I'd like to make a complaint to the management. When I went to sleep, I had collected all the original Avengers. I've only got a partial set here."

"Phil!" He could hear rustling and Tony Stark's voice, sounding confused. "Go back to sleep, Tony." There was the sound of a door opening and shutting. "Clint said I have to tell you I watched you when you were sleeping."

"I'm never going to live that down." Clint twitched a little in his sleep and Phil ran a hand down his side. "The woman you hired to do my PT is not only cruel, she looks like she's 12."

"She's not twelve, she's a certified professional with excellent references who signed three different NDAs."

"I need to thank you." Besides an itchy scar and weak muscles, he was whole and Clint was here. He'd lost everything else, but he still had those things. "I'm sure Stark and Banner pulled the equivalent of bringing home a puppy and dumped all the responsibilities in your lap."

"It was nothing. You're my friend and what was done to you was monstrous. Fury used you up and threw you away."

Phil didn't know what to say to that. It was an uncomfortable truth. "I was wondering if you'd heard about Stark's plan to open a home for wayward superheroes."

"No one wants to lease office space in a building where a Norse god went head to head with an unstoppable force. Everyone's convinced Tony is a trouble magnet, they're not exactly wrong."

"Clint had an idea. I think it has a lot of potential but I wanted to run it by you."

* * *

They ended up having to have a conference call, since everyone had scattered. No one was quite sure how to get ahead of Thor, but they'd put an invite on the roof where Heimdall could see it so he was probably watching.

Natasha was on the road with Captain America, doing something she wouldn't tell them about but she'd called in a few minutes early. "You're looking much better."

"I was comatose the last time you saw me. I hope I'm looking better." Honestly, the past few weeks had been like a vacation. Nothing had fallen to Earth, no one had been kidnapped and he'd had Clint in his bed every night. He couldn't remember the last time that had happened. "Are you planning on coming back?"

"When we're done." She turned the camera so it was pointed at Steve. "Say hello to Agent Coulson. Tell him I've been handling you with gloves and that I'm storing you in a hard plastic card-sleeve."

"Natasha." He was smiling and he looked less tense than he had before. "Hello, Agent Coulson. Natasha has been taking very good care of me."

Phil tried not to read too much into that statement. "I'm sure she has."

Bruce had set up shop on one of their couches and when Stark's video stream switched on he had all of the Avengers currently on Earth. If Steve looked like he'd finally acclimated, Tony looked like he'd spent the past few weeks not sleeping. "Alright, I'm here. Pepper said you have some kind of crazy idea."

"It's not a crazy idea." Clint was folding a paper airplane out of a take out menu. "Crazy plans are my area. Phil's are always well thought out and rational."

"It's a little crazy." Bruce had been spending too much time with Clint.

"If we can't turn to SHIELD for support, we're going to have to look elsewhere." It hurt more than the chest wound to have to admit it.

"We can't trust them, no matter what." Clint set down the paper, suddenly paying attention. "If Fury could do this to Phil, the rest of us mean less than nothing to him."

"The Avengers Initiative was never meant to stop with your recruitment. Initial plans included at least three more members on this squad and a West Coast division." Phil would have to throw away every plan he'd ever made for Marcus, but there were lots of meta-humans running around these days. He'd have to throw out every plan he'd had for his entire life, except for this. "The world is changing and we're out of allies. You need another heavy with Thor offworld, and another set of eyes in the sky. Let me find you what you need. Let me finish my work."


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9: Suzanne from HR III

Summary: I'm sorry about all this, I'm sure it's been a logistical nightmare for you.

Notes: If you have any particular character you'd like to see Agent Coulson recruit, please let me know! You can comment here or leave me a note on Tumblr ( )

August 2012

The memorial they had for Agent Coulson at the end of summer was touching and sad. Suzanne wanted to shoot someone, probably Nick Fury himself. There were a lot of damp eyes and touching speeches and in the end Nick Fury had climbed onto the platform to tell a story.

It was a story about when Phil had been an army ranger and he and a friend had both been injured. Phil had gotten them both to safety, even though he'd been shot. Most of the audience, staring at Nick Fury's eyepatch and the bloodshot condition of his remaining eye, drew their own conclusions about who that friend had been.

Susan decided about halfway through the story that shooting him would be too impersonal, she would need to strangle him. His act was flawless. If she hadn't see Phil alive in a hospital bed, she would have bought it just like everyone else.

* * *

Agent Coulson woke up two weeks after his friends at SHIELD buried him. She found out when her burner phone rang on a rare weeknight at home in front of the tv.

"I hear I owe you a favor."

It took her a moment to place the voice, they'd mostly communicated via email. "It can wait a few more weeks. I'm pretty patient."

"I was actually hoping you'd do another, on credit."

Before New York, a favor from Agent Coulson had been the gold standard of political currency at SHIELD. "What do you need?"

"Your washouts. Anyone who was set aside because they were a bad fit, not because of their skill set."

"Are you sure?" SHIELD was practically an island of misfit toys, they didn't turn away assets for little quirks.

"Half this team failed their psych exams and they made it work."

* * *

It was hard, working for an organization she could no longer trust. She's worked for SHIELD since grad school, she'd always thought they were the good guys. There were days she felt like quitting, just walking away and doing anything else but she kept coming in. There were people here who needed her and it wasn't their fault the Director had turned out to be a monster.

She bit her tongue in the breakroom when Sitwell called Blake Coulson again and she had the wall in Blake's office fixed even though he didn't put in a work request. She did what she could to make their lives easier and she did what she could to make Fury's life harder.

There were a thousand tiny ways an angry administrator could make your life miserable and in the year after New York she used all of them on their esteemed director. She'd always been flexible with deadlines but now timecards were closed promptly and senior management's expense reports went to the bottom of the pile. When she went home at night, she hung out on message boards and Reddit, sowing distrust in SHIELD. It made Suzanne feel petty but it was the only thing that got her through her days.

She came into her office in early September to find Andrew pacing in front of her desk. She dropped her bag by the door, already dreading whatever he had to say. "What is it?"

"I quit." There was an envelope on her desk. "I will not work with that *thing*. I won't do it."

"What thing?" The envelope wasn't sealed and there was a two line resignation letter inside. "Andrew, we've talked about this."

"Agent Coulson walked into my sickbay yesterday, asking me about Clint." Andrew stopped pacing and collapsed into one of her chairs. "I think it's an LMD."

She tasted bile. "We can do that?"

"Apparently. I'm a surgeon, not a robotics expert. I checked, there are three other agents who died at Pegasus who reported to work today."

The whole thing was crazy and Andrew had been under a lot of stress. "I don't accept your resignation." She tore the letter in half. "Stay here, sleep on my couch. You look like shit."

She took the elevator to the floor where Level Seven supervisors had their offices. Agent Coulson's office had been emptied but never reassigned, and his name plate was back on the door. She knocked then opened the door without waiting for an answer. The man sitting behind the desk certainly looked like Philip Coulson, down to the suit he was wearing. "More paperwork? Coming back from the dead has created a lot of red tape."

"You'll have to talk to Agent May about that." It's voice sounded right, but LMDs were good like that. Looking at it upset her. "Doctor Vitale told me you're looking for Clint Barton."

"I am." It looked wistful for a minute then refocused. "Don't tell me he filled a change of address before he went into hiding."

"Paperwork was never Agent Barton's strong suit." She pulled up a chair and made herself look it in the eye. "Doctor Vitale told everyone you were dead. I planned your memorial."

"I know, I saw the video." It shook it's head. "I was hurt, not dead. Fury shipped me off to Tahiti to recover." It sounded disgruntled about an imaginary vacation. "I just got back a few days ago. I'm sorry about all this, I'm sure it's been a logistical nightmare for you."

"Tahiti?"

It smiled at her. "It's a magical place."

"Agent Barton isn't coming back, not unless the world is ending. You must know that."

"I'll find him." It sounded so sure, looked so sad. "I know how I must seem to my co-workers but I'm not a robot. I'm a human being, who loves his husband. I'm going to find him and ask him to come home."

"I see." She got out of his office as soon as she could. Andrew was right. They both needed to quit, right now. This was too far, too much to take. When she got back to her apartment just after ten, Andrew was sprawled out on her couch. His eyes opened when she let herself in. "I accept your resignation. We'll pay out your saved vacation time and I'll make sure you get a positive reference from whoever your resume says you're working for."

"What do we do?" He sat up, rubbing his eyes.

She got the scotch tape out of her drawer and taped his letter back together. "You don't need to do anything, Andrew. Go pack your desk and get out of here. Before Fury remembers you signed the death certificate."

"Suzanne-"

"It thinks it's Phil!" She hadn't meant to shout and she was breathing fast. "It think it's Phil and it wants its husband back. We need to get out of here. Please, go."

She went through the rest of her day in a daze. The LMD ate lunch in the Level 7 breakroom and let Sitwell and Blake fill him in on everything he'd missed. She sat in the back, listening to it laugh and make jokes.

When the day finally ended she went home and wrote one last message on all the boards she haunted, giving them a final warning about SHIELD, then she hammered a half dozen nails into her hard drive and dumped her whole laptop into the bathtub. While it filled, she stared at the handful of numbers in her cellphone. "Bruce, it's Suzanne. I need your help."


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10: Skye

Summary: Obviously not canon compliant with the most recent episode.

Contains Spoilers for E01X05 "Girl in the Flower Dress" She was desperate to regain his trust, his approval, and he knew it.

She was desperate to regain his trust, his approval, and he knew it. "I need you to find this man."

The photo Coulson had given her wasn't one of SHIELD's crisp 8x12s, it looked like he'd pulled it out of his wallet. "Okay." The ring of metal around her wrist clattered against the table when she set the photo down. "Can I ask who he is?"

"Agent Clint Barton. Codename: Hawkeye."

A week ago, she would have fan-girled at him about the Avengers but after Austin… "How long ago did he miss check in?"

"Agent Barton hasn't been seen since the Battle for New York." Coulson's face was a mask and she hated it. "I'll get you access to anything you'll need."

The attack on New York had been over a year ago. The man was a Level Seven agent and the trail had to be stone cold. The chances of finding him were terrible. "Yes, sir."

* * *

Coulson had pointed her to SHIELD's security footage as a starting point and Skye wished it had been anything else. There was no audio but what she could see was enough.

She had known Coulson had been injured on the helicarrier but it was one thing to know it and another to see Loki drive a staff through his chest. She had seen Nick Fury in passing that time they had destroyed the plane and he'd seemed like a stone-cold bad ass but he looked afraid as hecrouched in a pool of Coulson's blood.

She closed the video and stared at the screen. Agent Barton wasn't tagged in many of the security videos from that day, which was odd. She could follow the other Avengers as they went through their day but there was no video attributed to Barton until he suited up and stole a plane. "Sir, where was Agent Barton during the attack on the helicarrier?"

She had been expecting to hear that he'd been wounded and gone to fight despite it. Instead, Coulson looked up from his computer and in that same bland tone he'd been using all day said, "He was leading it."

She wanted desperately to ask Coulson why they were looking for Hawkeye but he hadn't been in a question answering mood. Why had he fought for Loki then gone and battled the Chitauri in the streets? Were they planning on arresting him, killing him?

She opened the next video attributed to Barton. It was in SHIELD medical, hours after Iron Man had nuked the aliens and the Black Widow had closed the portal. He was arguing with a doctor and whatever the guy told him just destroyed him. He'd slammed his fist against the man's desk and she watched his shoulders hitch, his body shudder. He was crying. The Widow wrapped her arms around him and she quickly closed the video.

Coulson was watching her watch the video, and when she closed the file he said, "They were informed that my body had been destroyed for national security reasons. It's the last time any of the Avengers were on the helicarrier." Then he went back to his paperwork like faking his own death was something that happened all the time.

There was a death certificate on file for Philip Coulson, signed by Doctor Andrew Vitale. It was obviously faked but there was no video tagged with Coulson's name after it was signed. She found it the hard way, by following Coulson from camera to camera as medics and then surgeons fought to save his life.

There were no official medical records about what had been done to save Coulson's life but she found a file on Doctor Vitale's private share the next morning with nothing but a serial number in the patient name information. The injuries matched the ones in Coulson's file, it couldn't be anyone but him.

Doctor Vitale had thrown a kitchen-sink's worth of experimental medical technology into Coulson. Something had obviously worked but the doctor writing the record had been under a lot of stress. There were notes about the Director and secret orders and HR, of all things. Once they'd gotten involved, Coulson had been transferred off the helicarrier. To Tahiti, maybe? Coulson was always talking about doing his rehab in Tahiti.

Coulson had obviously been looking for Agent Barton for a while. He'd provided her with a list of searches he'd already performed, security footage from airports, train stations and bus stations. Barton hadn't turned up in any of it. Someone else at SHIELD had been looking as well, logging their efforts in Barton's file. That person had been searching carnivals and fairs, looking for a sharpshooter, an archer, a carney who couldn't stay out of trouble.

Coulson had been all about second chances lately. Maybe he was trying to find Barton first, give him a chance to come in?

The way Skye saw it, they were both going about it wrong. New York was a big city, big enough to lose yourself in. SHIELD had access to a lot of the security footage feeds and she started a facial recognition search using Agent Barton's official SHIELD picture. Coulson had taken the snapshot back.

Coulson didn't seem to need much sleep. He stayed up late watching her work, until he finally went to his bunk around 2 am. It wasn't trust that made him let her keep working unsupervised, it was the keylogger but she'd take what she could get.

She'd called it because the facial recognition returned a result. There was a restaurant near Stark Tower that used a video security system SHIELD had remote access to.

Agent Barton had eaten there, and recently. He had shared a booth with a man with salt and pepper hair last Wednesday. A little research turned up the guy's name. Doctor Bruce Banner was a Stark Industries consultant and he was apparently shacked up with an Avenger because when she backtracked them Barton and Banner had walked from Stark Tower to the dinner, together.

She watched them walk together to the dinner every Wednesday for weeks, as far back as the video archive went. Skye had always had an active imagination. She was suddenly sure they were living together. There was something protective about the way Barton treated Banner, about how he ran interference against the crowds as they walked, the way they touched.

She could picture SHIELD bursting into their apartment, dragging Barton out of bed and black-bagging him. It would be her fault.

A little more digging in local cameras turned up the rest of the Avengers. Thor, wearing a hoodie and drinking a giant coffee. The Black Widow, sitting in a bakery. Captain America, sketching in a notebook. There was no sign of the Hulk, but she couldn't really imagine him living in a Manhattan Stark was everywhere, but he always had been. The real question was, how had SHIELD missed this?

There were facial recognition searches running on all the Avengers, and when she ran them in the front-end interface nothing came back. It was only when she hit the back end directly that she got results. She did a quick comparison of video counts in the frontend and the backend. Everything she could spot the Avengers in was missing. The hack was so neat she could barely see it.

There was something else missing from the front end. A whole folder of videos on a Doctor Streiten's private share. She opened the first one to find Agent Coulson laid out on a metal table.

"It looks right." The Director came into frame. "Very Phil-like."

"We based it off his last scan from PEGASUS." A man in a lab coat came over to Phil's body. He pushed up the scrub shirt Phil was wearing, exposing a huge scar on his chest. "We thought this would add to the effect."

"Don't." The Director's voice was sharp and he grabbed the Doctor's hand. "He's not a science experiment."

"I'm sorry, sir." The man extricated his hand from Fury's grip. "We're ready to proceed."

"Give me a minute." The video ended and Skye gave her screen a puzzled look. Something about that little scene felt wrong. She pulled up the next one in the sequence.

"Let's begin." Doctor Streiten was holding a screwdriver. "Roll it onto it's stomach."

Two assistants rolled Coulson's body over and Doctor Streiten jammed the screwdriver into his neck. Skye bit back a scream but there was no blood. Instead, a panel popped open. There was a port visible under the panel that looked like it would be right at home in the Matrix.

They plugged a cable into a port and Streiten opened up a laptop. "Beginning transfer."

She went on to the next video, her stomach churning. They had moved him from the metal slab to a regular doctor's bench. They had dressed Coulson in a suit and they'd propped him up so he was sitting. The doctor closed the hatch and quickly shone a light into Coulson's eyes. "Alright, Agent Coulson, you're all set."

"There was never anything wrong with my eyes." Coulson pushed Vitale's hands away. "Now that you're done prodding me, I'd like to see Clint."

"I don't know where Agent Barton is." The doctor stepped back. "You'll have to talk to the Director."

The video ended and Skye realized she was shivering. "I'm working for Cerberus."

* * *

She couldn't sleep, she didn't even try. She just sat at the computer until Coulson came back into his office around 6 am. "Did you sleep?"

"No." The screen was blank but she was still staring at it. "I found Agent Barton."

"Good, good." He sat down behind his desk, a cup of coffee in his hands. "Where is he?"

"Shacked up with some guy in New York." Everyone said he was different now. How much of that was the experience of dying and how much of it was the fact that he had a new body? Skye made her hand move the mouse and the screen blinked back into life. "That's them."

He'd twitched a little at 'shacked up' but when he saw Doctor Banner he smiled a little. "Stark must have locked him up in a lab after New York. I can't believe he didn't run. Play the video."

They sat in silence as the video played. She couldn't believe Coulson wanted to watch Barton eat eggs but apparently he did. "Is he going to get a trial?"

"What?" Coulson seemed reluctant to look away from the screen.

"I know he almost got you killed and you want justice, but I would feel better if he was getting a trial. He fought for you, in the end." Whenever she'd accidentally fallen asleep, she'd seen Agent Barton being dragged out of bed by SHIELD agents. "You can lie to me, if you have to."

"I'm not arresting him, Skye. He's not responsible for his actions during the attack." Coulson finally looked away when the clip ended. " I want to bring him home. When I couldn't find him, I was sure the WSC has arrested him or… He wouldn't have killed himself, but he can be reckless. It's good, that you found him."

"They're all there. The Avengers, I mean. Someone's been interfering with SHIELD's monitoring of them." She'd taken notes for whoever's job tracking the hack would be. They wouldn't be trusting her unless they had to for a long while.

"JARVIS." Coulson was smiling over the lip of his coffee. "I'll take care of it."

She pushed away from the computer terminal, ready to try and get some sleep, but she couldn't stop herself. "You'll see it in the logger anway, but no more secrets. I watched the videos of you in Doctor Streiten's folder."

The smile slipped away. "What videos?"

* * *

She set up the backscatter glasses for him, then passed the frames over. Coulson slipped them on then stared into the mirror over his sink. Long moments of silence passed before he asked, "How did I die?"

"I don't know." Doctor Vitale had quit, suddenly, a few weeks ago. Probably because a dead man had shown up and said hello. "You were recovering, when they transferred you. Something must have gone wrong."

He slipped the glasses off and let them drop into the sink. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the mirror. Coulson was always so put together, it was strange to see him like this. "What am I?"

"A SHIELD agent. Who happens to be a android." She shrugged and thought about touching his shoulder, decided against it. "Does it matter? You're still Phil Coulson. Our bodies are just meat."

"Meat." Phil straightened up and he was looking in the mirror again.

"Meat." Skye hoped her nodding looked encouraging. "I can lend you some books about transhumanism. Well, PDFs."

"You're not understanding the issue at hand, Skye. Why am I looking for Agent Barton?"

"Because…" He had looked fond, even though the man had almost gotten him killed. "Because he was one of yours. You were his SO and you don't leave people behind."

"Almost right. I was his SO, ten years ago. He was the best shot anyone at SHIELD had ever seen, but he had a mouth on him and a problem with what he called 'stupid' orders. It got easier when I realized we were giving him stupid orders and started trusting his judgement. He always made the right call, in the field at least, even when you thought he was crazy. That's how we got Natasha."

"Coulson-"

"I didn't have you looking for an Avenger. I had you looking for my husband." Phil rubbed his thumb over his bare left ring finger. "What do I say to him? Sorry I was dead for a year, how do you feel about robots?"

"I wouldn't start there. Maybe hello?"

Phil fished the glasses out of the sink and passed them back to her. "I could try hello."


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11: Clint Barton I

Summary: Clint's got a lot on his plate right now.

Notes: From this point on, I will no longer be worrying about staying compliant with cannon. I'm not spoiled for Thor, but the new Cap2 trailer sunk me. This chapter contains no spoilers for the movie, but does contain the Winter Soldier himself. I had a few pages written from Natasha's perspective explaining how they brought him home, but I'm not sure it belongs in this story.

_Monday_  
October 28th 2013

The Tower was, hands down, the nicest place he had ever lived. The apartment he'd had with Phil before New York had held that distinction before, but it had nothing on the digs Tony Stark thought were appropriate for his family. The Tower was a marvel of green engineering, and the fall air didn't leak through the windows, but Clint had JARVIS turn down the temperature at night so they could sleep under their heavy comforter. He woke up in the grey light of an early morning snuggled under the comforter and as an added bonus, Phil was pressed against his back, an arm thrown around his waist, stroking his belly. "Morning."

"Morning." A year later, the gratitude of still getting to have this still hadn't worn off. "What time is it?"

"Seven thirty." Phil snapped the waistband of Clint's boxers. "I have an hour before the car service gets here. Shower with me?"

They made excellent use of the hour, even if at the end of it Clint ended up sprawled across the tile floor, watching Phil get dressed.

"Do you want a hand up?" Phil looped a tie around his neck and knotted it.

"No, I'm good." The tile was heated and he really didn't want to move. "Where are you headed?"

"To talk to the Major." Phil grabbed his suit jacket off a hanger. "I'll be back Friday morning."

"Okay. Have fun." He had plenty of work to do here. "Breakfast when you get back?"

"I'll see you there." Phil crouched down and kissed him. "Sure you're okay down there?"

"I'm fine. Have a good trip."

* * *

Mondays were for armory work. "Morning, Barnes."

"Morning." Barnes had his combat arm in pieces and was cleaning it. "Where's your suit off to this week?"

"West Coast." Clint pulled out his hand guns and a box of rags. "He wants to recruit some metahuman out there."

"Do you want to go do something today? I'm going stir crazy in this place." Barnes glanced at the ceiling. "Your benevolent overlord found me a camera shop and told me Tony will pay for anything I want."

"Steve still driving you crazy?"

"I used to pull this crap on him. It's payback for every time I buried him under all the blankets we owned and hid his shoes so he couldn't sneak out." Barnes threw his rag in the bin and switched to a new one for the weird polish Tony had designed. "He's afraid SHIELD is going to grab me."

"Yeah, let's go. We'll sneak out after lunch. What Steve doesn't know won't panic him."

* * *

Barnes had a real knack for espionage. He'd been doing surveillance for the Red Room for decades, but he'd spent most of the past two decades on ice and digital cameras were new to him. "Are these expensive? They seem expensive."

Barnes was looking at a top end DSLR camera. "Stark's a generous guy. And filthy rich. It's a pretty potent combination."

"He's sorta crazy." Barnes set the camera down and picked up the next one on the shelf. "He's built me three new arms in the past month."

"He builds things when he's stressed." There were only three Iron Man suits in the Tower, a big improvement from a few months ago.

Barnes lowered his voice. "What is he? Humans still need sleep, right?"

"He's human. Tony's just as patched together as the rest of us, he just has different outlets." Helping Pepper had consumed him after Christmas and when that was done he'd had heart surgery. Since then, he'd been channeling his anxiety into equipping the team. "Buy the camera. You never know when we'll need to spy on someone."

* * *

_Tuesday_

Tuesday mornings were for hanging out with JARVIS. "Okay," He slid into Phil's office chair. "What do you have for me today?"

"I have gathered additional information on unauthorized use of Extremis." JARVIS activated the holoscreen. "However, more urgently, someone at SHIELD has discovered my interference with their facial recognition software. I am altering tactics, but it's likely your location has been discovered. You are in public more often than the rest of the team."

"We'll worry about it later. Show me what you've got about Extremis." A year in hiding had been outside his most optimistic plans. "Who blew up this time?"

"A street magician named Chan Ho Yin. The gentleman was a mutant, a pyrokinetic. SHIELD's records indicate his unique blood chemistry caused the protocol to stabilize. It is a different approach to Sir's."

"If it stabilized, why did he blow up?" He'd taken most of a building with him, by the looks of it.

"The organization who kidnapped him filtered his blood platelets, which protected him from his own mutation. It would have taken several weeks for his body to replenish them, unless he possessed a healing factor."

Clint opened the file, saw the Supervising Agent's name and ignored it. "Scorch? Did the guy not notice they'd given him a supervillain name?"

"Mister Yin was not a native English speaker."

"Barnes and Natasha are convinced this is the Red Room. Steve is convinced it's HYDRA. Tony's worried the Ten Rings are on their way back. Do you have a pet theory?"

"Access to Extremis could indicate an associate with AIM. However, with Mr. Killian dead and his unethical practices before that death, it's possible the technology could have passed to any number of groups."

"So.."

"A worst case scenario would involve your individual enemies banding together to form a team of super villains in the style of the Avengers."

"Wow. Just, wow. You're sort of a bummer, Jarvis, you know that?"

* * *

There was a paper sign taped to the door of the movie room on the common floor. It read, "21st Century Boot Camp" and Clint tore it down. "This is not a boot camp. There would be an obstacle course if it was boot camp."

There was a whiteboard on one wall where they'd been writing questions. Today it read, 'Why is "I never asked for this" funny?'

"Tony's movie collection is an obstacle course." Steve had the holoscreen on and was paging through it. "Bucky, did we shoot film in Italy? I don't remember a camera crew."

"That's not us, it's some actors. The one filmed in Germany is us." Barnes was taking up an entire couch and he was throwing the occasional piece of popcorn at Thor's head. "If we went to Asgard, would your mom have embarrassing video of you we could watch?"

"We do not record our lives in this way. However," Thor caught the next kernel in midair, "There are many bards in Asgard who might be persuaded to share tales of my youth. Many of them are liars."

"Sure… Because you never did any of the crazy shit in our mythology." Clint sprawled out in a recliner. "JARVIS, let's get some youtube clips of Deus Ex. Then we'll watch an episode of Deep Space Nine. What's up next?"

"Duet, Mister Barton."

Clint grabbed a soda off the table. There was going to be a lot of angry shouting at the TV after this one.

* * *

_Wednesday_

"Food?" Bruce didn't even look up. "Tea?"

"Okay." Bruce pushed away from his lab bench. "I thought we went for breakfast on Wednesdays?"

"It is Wednesday." This was why he dragged Bruce out of the lap every week.

"Oh." Bruce followed him to the elevator. "Tony came by to talk about… yogurt? Then we designed a new synthetic fabric for the Other Guy."

"Are the pants made out of yogurt?" That was a little weird, even for Tony.

"I'm not sure how we got from A to B, but the fabric's nice. We can try it out later."

* * *

Beth was holding a couple menus, but she didn't set them down. "Do you guy want these or do you just want the usual?"

"Usual. Make sure you get the Doc his weird tea first thing, Mister Stark kept him up all night." Bruce claimed to sleep eight hours in every twenty four but Clint was pretty sure they weren't consecutive or at night.

"It's not…" Bruce trailed off. Explaining Tony was hard. "I've worked for worse people."

"Uhuh." Beth filled Clint's cup with coffe. "Let me get you some hot water."

"You've got that woman convinced Tony is a crazy person who keeps us locked up in his Tower so he can make us work in the middle of the night."

"Do you really want her thinking about the *other* reason our motley little group is living in the Tower? Because I have better things to do than hide from the press." Also, it was cute when she hit on Steve.

* * *

He went to change after breakfast, so Bruce was already in the training room when he got there. He was sitting crosslegged, eyes closed, breathing shallow. Clint sat across from him and waited. Eventually, Bruce opened his eyes. They were the brilliant green that meant he'd been communicating with the Hulk. "What are we doing today?"

"Playing catch. Think he's up for that?" Playing catch with the Hulk involved falling from high places. Clint was always on the hunt for someone else to catch him.

"We'll find out." Bruce unfolded and Clint watched the change roll over him as he got to his feet.

The Hulk towered over him, but after months of this the Hulk knew him, didn't think of him as a threat. "Hey, big guy. Welcome back." Clint opened his bow case. "The game of the day is, Catch the Hawkeye." He shot a grappling arrow at the rafters. "Ready?"

The Hulk roared and Clint smiled and activated the grapple.

* * *

_Thursday_

"James has a new camera." Natasha was sitting at his kitchen table when he stumbled out of bed on Thursday morning. "And a digital printer."

"Yup." He slumped into his chair. "I figure he'll torture us all for a few weeks, then it won't be such a novelty anymore."

"You don't know him like Steve and I do. The man has a strategic mind." She took an apple from the bowl on his table. "Now that JARVIS has lost containment on the facial recognition database, we need to take start getting back into the public eye before we start disappearing. Ten dollars says we start to see candid photos of the Avengers appearing in the Bugle within the next 90 days."

* * *

Clint took a cab to the nearest messenger service and presented them with a box addressed to Stark Industries, care of Natalie Rushman. "Hey, do you have any messengers that look sort of sketchy?"

The clerk, who had been going through the transaction in a daze, actually seemed interested. "We've got one with full sleeve tattoos, gauged ears and a bad attitude."

"Great, I want that one." Clint signed the receipt. "Make sure they're rude to the receptionist."

"Okay…" The clerk gave Clint back his credit card. "Um, what's in the box? Cause Mister Stark is sorta dangerous and I don't need Iron Man bursting through my wall."

"Don't worry about it." Clint showed him a Stark Industries ID. "This is a security audit."

* * *

They actually called personnel and checked he was who he claimed to be. Of course, his Stark ID read Francis Cole but Happy had vouched for him so off the package went. Clint drove back to the Tower and waited outside the lobby for the bike messenger. "You have any trouble?"

"Not at all." The woman took her helmet back. "She just took the package and put it on a shelf."

That wasn't good. "Thanks for your help." He gave her a fifty dollar bill and watched her pedal away, shaking his head. Happy was going to be pissed.

He showed his ID to get into the Security Office and found Happy already watching the monitors, making pained noises. "It's vibrating. How can she not notice it's vibrating?"

"Too much else going on. That's why all mail is supposed to be diverted to the mail room. You know, where the bomb sniffing machine are." He'd even coated the outside of the box in a brand of lotion that caused false positives in the machine that checked for plastic explosives. Clint glanced at the clock on the wall. "In about five minutes, the timer inside that box is going to go off. At that point, we can call this exercise a failure."

"It's a failure now." Happy took the Tower's security very personally, especially since Pepper had come back from California as a biological weapon. They spent the next five minutes in tense silence only broken by the occasional curse word.

When the timer inside the box went off, the receptionist actually picked it up and opened it instead of calling security. It was lunchtime and the lobby was packed. If it had really been a bomb, a few dozen people could have been injured. "Yeah, we're going to need to give the desk staff a security refresher. Before they get someone killed."

"I'll make sure to bring my CT scans along to show the class." Happy picked up the phone. "Someone get that receptionist up here. She's making us look like amateurs."

* * *

He called Phil before bed. "Still coming back tomorrow?"

"I'll be landing in New York around eight am your time. I'll be at the dinner around nine."

"How's it going out there?" Clint shut off the lights and climbed into bed. "What did she say?"

"Major Danvers is on board. We'll just need to wait for her term of service to be up and then she's willing to help establish our West Coast presence."

Their bed didn't normally feel too big, but it had been empty all week. They'd spent half their marriage in different cities, different countries, sometimes on different continents and they'd missed each other but he'd never felt lonely after just a few days. "Phil, how did we do this before? I remember going weeks without seeing you and it wasn't like this."

"I don't know." There was a pause. "I can't remember ever getting to spend more than a few nights in a week together and to get that we had to move in together. I'll be home soon. I don't have anything planned for tomorrow and the weekend is free too. I'm all yours."

"You'd better be."

* * *

_Friday_

Clint got to the dinner about fifteen minutes early and ordered a cup of coffee. Bruce had gotten him addicted to Hashi puzzles and he poked at one for a few minutes, trying to get the paths right, as he waited for Phil.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone slip into the booth across from him. Clint looked up. Phil looked a little nervous. Maybe there had been turbulence on the flight. If you fell out of the sky enough times, that started to get to you. "Hello."

"There you are." Clint gave him a smile, and set down his pencil. "Welcome back."


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12: Phil Coulson (Alpha Fork) II

Summary: "Have you been waiting for me?"

He slid into the co-pilot seat beside May and stared out at the blue sky. She let him sit there, quiet, for about five minutes then glanced over. "Here for a flying lesson?"

"No." The sky was a very calming shade of blue, which was good because right now he wanted to ring Marcus's neck. "You know, don't you? About Tahiti?"

May had never been big on bullshit. "I processed the paperwork. You cost almost as much as this plane."

"And you still came along?" He'd always suspected she was a little crazy, all field agents were.

"You're still you. I wouldn't be here if I wasn't sure of that." She switched on auto-pilot and turned in her chair. "Why are we talking about this now? Do you want to talk about what it means to be human? Do you need a ride somewhere for a tune up?"

"I didn't know." That was the worst part, that Marcus hadn't told him. "Tahiti isn't a cover. I remember being there. I remember months of PT, screaming at doctors, trying to get to a computer, trying to find out anything about what happened to Clint." Melinda kept her dash clear which was too bad, he could use something to fidget with. "So we'll be avoiding the helicarrier until I calm down. Even for the Director, this is too far."

"Fury's always been a bastard and he's always like you best. You mix the two…"

"And he brings you back from the dead and can't look you in the eye." It explained how Marcus had pulled away from him since he'd gotten back. They'd talk about it, when Phil was sure he could do it without screaming. He had more important things to do right now. "I need you to divert to New York."

* * *

He'd brought Ward along. Clint didn't always react predictably and if things went badly Phil was sure he'd appreciate the backup. If things went well then he could drive Skye back to the jet. It was a double duty contingency plan, but he was already regretting it.

"What's he doing?" Ward was watching the security feed. All it showed was Clint drinking coffee by himself.

"Maybe he's waiting for Doctor Banner." Skye was trying to be helpful, Phil was sure of it, but that had been the wrong thing to say.

"Bruce Banner? Sir, I can't let you go in there alone, not if the Hulk is involved. Let me call in a retrieval team-"

"Even if we had something on hand that could even slow the Hulk down, Agent Barton trained our best retrieval teams. He also trained you. We're not here to arrest him, Ward, just talk to him." Phil had waited long enough. "Just come rescue me if he pulls a gun."

In the videos on SHIELD's servers, he'd seen a Clint torn apart by grief but that had been a year ago and he seemed better now. Phil was glad, even if he was sure he was about to reopen the wound. He slid into the booth and when Clint looked up at him everything he'd been planning to say vanished. Phil ended up taking Skye's advice after all. "Hello."

Clint did something Phil hadn't anticipated in any of the scenarios he'd imagined on the way here. He didn't pull his gun, ask if he was going crazy or get angry. Instead, he smiled. "There you are. Welcome back."

It was absurd but… "Have you been waiting for me?"

"Of course I've been waiting for you." Clint signalled the waitress. "Beth, can you get us some pancakes?"

The woman flipped over Phil's coffee cup and filled it, leaving space for cream. "Do you want bananas today?"

"No. Thank you though." Everything felt a little surreal, a little off.

"Tough flight?" Clint reached across the table and took one of his hands. Phil was sure Skye and Ward were losing their minds in the van.

"Not really." JARVIS, it had to be JARVIS. He had so many questions but what came out of his mouth was, "I missed you."

It was no 'I watched you when you were sleeping' but Clint seemed to get a kick out of it. He smiled, god, Phil had missed his smile. "Good. I'm glad I wasn't the only one." He'd been about to say something else when his phone rang. When he saw the number on the screen, the grin got a bit wider and he answered it with a laugh. "Hello?" Who ever was on the other line had surprised him because the grin went away instantly and he was doing his lizard impression. "I'm having breakfast with Phil. Yes, I'm aware of that. I could bring him back to the Tower with me. Alright." Clint slid the phone back into his pocket, the aura of a lazy morning gone. "There's an emergency. Can you come back with me? We'll talk in private."

"Alright." He could have pancakes anytime.

"Are you alone?" Clint pulled his jacket off a hook at the end of the booth.

"Ward's watching, but I can get rid of him." Phil looked up the security camera and gave the all-clear sign. "We should be fine."

"JARVIS told me someone had found his hack." Clint's hands were jammed into his jacket pockets as they walked back to the Tower. "Who's your computer expert?"

"A consultant. A Rising Tide activist, if you can believe it." Whatever was going on at the Tower had Clint on edge. "Did you hear we found Akela?"

"I heard." Clint flashed his badge at the security guard in the lobby. "Can we get Agent Coulson a guest badge?" Happy Hogun was staring at them from a doorway and he didn't even smile when Phil waved.

The guard handed one over and Phil followed Clint through security to a private elevator. "How long have you known?"

"About a month? Someone at SHIELD tipped us off." The doors opened and Phil stepped out into a hallway. There weren't many people he'd let get behind him, but Clint was one of them. It didn't even occur to him how long a year was, how much a man's loyalties could shift, until he felt the gun barrel at the back of his neck. Clint shoved him forward through a door. The room was windowless, with nothing but a chair in the middle of it. "She told me you were looking for me, but I have to say, I wasn't expecting you to be this stupid."

He fought back when Clint cuffed him to the chair, fought back as hard as he could short of lethal force because this was all a mistake. He lost of course, muscle memory screwing him over again and Clint snapped the cuffs shot. "Clint, please. It's me."

"No, it's really not." Clint shut the door and he could hear an actual key turn in the lock. Then he was alone.

Eventually, the door opened again but it wasn't Clint. It was Suzanne, from HR. He was relieved, just for a moment, until he remembered she'd gone missing two months ago. She had a folding chair with her and sat down across from him. "I need to ask you some questions."

"I'd like answers, so I guess we're both out of luck." In the hour or so he'd been alone in here, he'd considered a half dozen terrify possibilities, the worst one involving a scenario where Clint had never broken free from Loki's control, that the entire Battle for New York had been a feint.

"I told Clint you'd been looking for him and that he should expect you sooner rather than later, but he'd always been stubborn." She considered him, like he was an object on display. "Do you know what you are?"

"I'm Philip Coulson, Agent of SHIELD." Suzanne gave him a dead-eyed look and he decided a small amount of cooperation was in order. "I'm a Life Model Decoy."

"So you understand that you're not Phil?"

"I am still the same man I was before." Skye had called their bodies meat and his insides were no one's business but his and Clint's. "If you'd like to talk about my resurrection, take it up with the Director. I want to talk to Clint, I want to explain."

She looked up over his shoulder, where there was probably a camera. She was wearing an earpiece and someone was giving her guidance. She wasn't an interrogator. "Tell me what led up to your activation. Why did the Director do this?"

"I don't know." They'd obviously restricted his physical capabilities to fool him into believing this body was human but right now Phil wished he'd had Fitzsimmons figure out how to turn that off. "Why are you here?"

"This is not a discussion, Agent Coulson." She looked sad for him. " Even if you really believe you are Phil Coulson, you shouldn't have come here. What did you think was going to happen?"

"I thought I would talk to Clint." Phil craned his head back, trying to see the camera. "Clint, it's really me. It's not a trick, I swear. I can prove it. Please, just talk to me."

Suzanne shifted uncomfortably. Someone was probably screaming in her ear. "Give me something. Give me some proof."

"I bought him a ring. I was going to ask him, but he beat me to it and I knew he couldn't wear it, so I just kept it. It's at the house in Portland, in the safe." Clint should have found it, when he emptied out the house.

She slipped out of the room and he was alone again.

* * *

He hadn't gotten a chance to eat breakfast. Phil wasn't actually sure if he needed to eat but he still felt hunger. Not that he was going to say anything but after a few hours the door opened. It wasn't Clint or any of the Avengers, but Phil couldn't shake the feeling he knew him from somewhere. He had a folding table under one arm and a take out bag dangling from the other.

He set up the table, laid out the food and uncuffed Phil. It was Chinese and there was a plastic fork, he'd done more with less and Clint knew it, but the man just sat down across from him like he was no threat. He served them both from the same container, which was a way an interrogator built trust. This was who Suzanne had been listening to when she'd been in here. "Don't try anything. My prosthetics are so much better than yours."

There was a subtle difference between his left and right hands but Phil couldn't make out which of them was the replacement. "I doubt it. I'm told I was very expensive."

"Stark built mine." He ripped open a packet of duck sauce and Phil still couldn't tell which hand was natural. "Suzanne says you really believe you're Phil Coulson. We thought that was bullshit but there really was a ring. Clint didn't know about it, no one knew. No one but Phil. So, you and me, we're going to talk. An answer for an answer."

"Let's start with a name, since you know mine." There was a whole database of prospective candidates for SHIELD, maybe this guy was on it, maybe that was why he looked familiar.

"James."

That had been a waste of a question. The only more common name he could have given was John. His interrogator poked at a piece of broccoli with a fork. "Why did Nick Fury do this? Create you?"

"I don't know." Someone had ordered him food he liked. Clint, maybe? "He called me his good eye. He needed me back."

"But you're not on the helicarrier, you're running a wet-works squad."

The wet-works comment set off all sorts of alarm bells. "What, exactly, have you heard about my team?"

"Clint's told me about Agents Ward and May, what they're capable of. You've got a black-hat hacker and a science team onboard. People like you and me, we know the scientist are the real sick ones. Then there's the fact that wherever you go, people die."

That was a dark spin on the past two months. "We go looking for problems and we do whatever it takes to stabilize the situation. Sometimes people die. It's regrettable, but we've saved more lives than we've lost."

"Your turn." When the man smiled, he looked even more familiar.

"How did you join the Avengers?" It was the right question. No way was this guy one of Stark's employees, he had to be one of Clint's strays.

"I knew Natasha, a long time ago. I just got out of a contract, saw her on the news. She came to meet up with me after the dust settled." The guy was giving a lot less than he was getting and Phil knew it. The questions James had asked were designed to make Phil defensive, make him talk. "Cap asked me if I would come back to New York, so here I am."

Steve Rogers had brought this man in? There was something almost feral about him, like he was ill at ease in his clothes. Phil knew men like that, men who never felt normal out of uniform. "You seem like the lone wolf type. Living here doesn't bother you?"

"Nah. Feels like home." There is something of New York in his voice, even though he doesn't have an accent.. "You getting anywhere, Agent? Figured it out yet?"

"Not yet." He ate his garlic shrimp as calmly as he could.

"Why are you here?"

"For Clint."

"No, you're going to need to give me more than that." James set down his fork. "See, I've done some stupid things for people I care about and we can go right up to the line of letting them think I'm dead. I only called Natasha because I needed help. So why are you here?"

"Is it so inconceivable I love my husband?" What kind of person did they think he was? "I once killed twenty men to get him out of an enemy base. Of course I came to find him."

James looked at him, studied him. Phil got the impression he was very good at this. "What, exactly, do you think happened when you went up against Loki?"

"I died."

"Jesus." James pushed away from the table. "Don't move, don't try to escape. Just, sit here and eat for five minutes."

It doesn't take five minutes, Clint must have been close by. He closed the door and leaned against the wall next to it. "I'm not under Loki's control. I haven't gone over to one of our enemies seeking revenge or any of the other things you're imagining."

"Alright." He and Clint were still on the same wavelength. It felt good. "Do you believe me? That I am Phil Coulson, even if this isn't my body? It's close, Clint. I didn't notice the difference."

"Phil…" Clint rubbed his face. "Phil, if you had died and Fury had pulled some Frankenstein bullshit to bring you back to life, I wouldn't have cared. You would be in my apartment, not locked up in a cell. But that not what happened."

"It is. They tried, Clint, but I died." He got up, slowly, not sure how Clint would react if he got closer. "I couldn't find you. I looked so hard, Clint, but I'm here now. It's me, I swear."

Clint shook his head. "You really don't get it, do you? I believe you. You're Philip J. Coulson. You have to be. I didn't even know that ring was there, you never said a damn thing." He gave the door a kick. "But that doesn't solve my problem, Phil."

The door opened, and it wasn't James on the other side. Phil was looking at… himself. That was him, standing there, wearing jeans.

Clint was looking at him like he looked at his marks sometimes, like he was sorry but he had to do it. "You didn't die, Phil. You've been here the whole time, with me."


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter 13: Marcus Johnson III

Summary: If he can just hold on a little longer...

Maria wasn't ready yet. It's what Marcus told himself when he rolled off his bunk every morning, when he sat in endless meetings, when he stayed up late looking for Clint Barton. Maria wasn't ready and if he walked before she was, the WSC would put some idiot in his chair. If he could just hold out a few more years, Maria's little girl won't be so little anymore and he could stop without destroying everything he'd built.

The moment Maria got the big chair, she'd be shoving Phil in her old office. The fact that the man was an android didn't seem to phase her at all and if Marcus just waited long enough he would forget Phil was dead and the man who looked just like him would fill up the empty spaces that being Nick Fury created. Marcus would forget and he would have someone to talk to again, if he could just hang on a little longer.

It's what Marcus told himself but today it just was not going to cut it. Today, Phil's quinjet had fallen off the grid. He found Maria in the Intelligence bullpen, terrorizing analysts. "Do we think it's the consultant?"

"Not a chance. I don't care how good she is, she'd have to get through May to hurt the plane." Maria gave one last glare at the analyst. "Find that plane," before she followed Marcus back into the hallway. "Six hours ago, I was willing to call this a technical problem but there is no where on Earth that is this far from a friendly installation. There are emergency beacons all over that plane, not a single one has been activated."

He knew where she was going with that line of thought and he didn't want to hear it. Either the man running that team was Phil Coulson and beyond doubt or he wasn't and Maria had given a stranger a quinjet and SHIELD personnel. "Just find them."

He went back to his office to review the search efforts again but he couldn't bring himself to actually log into his computer. Instead, he sat in his office with nothing but the blue glow of his logon screen lighting the room. "Damn it, Phil."

There was a noise behind his head, the sound of a bullet being chambered. "Good evening, sir. Having a rough day?"

Well, Marcus had been expecting something like this, sooner or later. "Your plane is in my maintenance bay, hiding in plain sight I take it?"

"It is. Between Skye and May, it was actually fairly easy. I'd file a report but when we're done here I quit. We all quit and we're taking the jet as severance."

"You seem upset, Agent Coulson. Care to share why you're here to kill me?" He'd expected Phil to take the whole LMD thing better than this.

"You need to ask? How many terrible things have you done this year?"

"Not that many." It was just they all involved Phil.

"Let's start with the fact that I'm an LMD and go from there."

Nick shut his eye. If Phil was going to kill him, he didn't need to see it coming. "I did not over react. You died on me, your hand-picked team vanished into the wind and the whole world went crazy. Do you have any idea what it was like, after New York? We've got Chitauri tech all over the place and we're lucky there's not another Abominiation running loose since your mystery villain is combining gamma rays and super-soldier serum. We lost the cooperation of Pepper Potts and a dozen other contact who wouldn't deal with anyone but you. I couldn't do it without you so I made a call. That you're here, standing behind me? It means it was the right one."

"You're monologuing, sir." There was a small rustle and Phil grabbed his chair, turned him around so they were face to face. The gun was back in it's holster. "Marcus, do you really think I died?"

"No, I shoved your brain into an LMD for kicks. Yes, you died. You bled to death right in front of me."

"I need a drink." Phil went to the other side of the desk and sank into a chair, rested his head on his hands. "This is…"

Nick took the whiskey bottle out of his desk and poured them both two fingers. "Things not go so well with Clint?"

"He had me interrogated by a former Red Room agent, so I would say not going well is an understatement." Phil reached out and took the glass but he didn't drink it, just pressed the glass to his forehead.

"I looked for him, Phil, but the man just didn't want to be found." Barton had always been a little too good at hiding. "Whatever he said to you today, he didn't mean it. He'll get over…" Marcus gestured at Phil's new body, "This."

"You really don't know, do you? You put yourself at the top of the Avenger's hit lists and you have no clue. You actually believe I died."

"You did. I was there." Phil's death had been on regular rotation in his nightmares for months.

"No, I really didn't." Phil downed his whiskey in a single long sip. "I… he. He survived."

"You. You survived." He shouldn't have thought of Phil as an 'it.' "You're not a copy."

"You're not listening." Phil set down his glass, slowly, like he was refraining from throwing it directly at Marcus' head. "You went to see Andrew Vitale after the battle. He declared me dead and gave you my wedding ring. What, exactly, did you say to him?"

"I didn't say anything."

"Yes, you did, because Andrew is afraid of you." Phil leaned forward in his chair. "Marcus, did you pull that 'No questions, do as I say' thing on a civilian doctor?"

"I needed to get to Barton. I didn't have time for him to some shell-shocked doctor."

Phil was either incredibly amused by that, or he was getting hysterical. It was hard to tell. "And you spent the next few weeks ducking HR meeting requests because?"

"The families of the dead were on the war path. It was going to be Foster and Lewis all over again but worse. There was nothing I could do." He would have made it worse with Emma. As it was, Suzanne had been forced to go out there in person to smooth it over. "That HR woman went off her rocker after New York. I don't believe for a minute she was kidnapped, she went over to one of our enemies. Right now, she's in one of their lairs, planning their corporate Thanksgiving and organizing workshops on how to impersonate SHIELD personnel."

The expression turned out to be hysteria because Phil was either laughing or crying or maybe both. Marcus refilled both their glasses and after a few minutes Phil seemed to get a hold of himself. "You're right, you do need me, because you screwed up so big and you don't even know it. Phil Coulson survived his injuries."

"Phil-"

"I saw him." Phil cut him off, suddenly furious. "The Avengers stole him out of medical more than a year ago. You scared Andrew so badly that he was afraid to say anything, so he went to HR. When you blew her off enough times, she got creative." He slammed his hands against Marcus' desk. "How could you be so careless with me? You didn't see a body, Marcus. Always check for a body!"

"He told me…" Andrew hadn't told him anything though, had he? He'd told Clint and then stood there, quiet, when Marcus had screamed into his face later. "I didn't think there was a body."

No wonder they'd lost Pepper, why Natasha had never come back. It was completely reasonable to expect Phil to pick up his gun again, but instead he just got up and headed for the door. "Phil, do you still quit?"

Phil looked back and he looked tired, defeated. He hadn't ever seen Phil look like that before. "No, sir, I guess I don't." He quietly closed the door behind him, leaving Marcus alone.

Nick Fury didn't apologize but then, Nick Fury wasn't real, even if Marcus had to pretend to be him every day. He told the closed door, "I'm sorry, Phil. I really fucked up."

* * *

Marcus was a lot things but he wasn't a coward and he wasn't a fool, so he carved out a day to go to New York, to see for himself. Phil met him in the lobby, dressed more casually than Nick had seen him in years. The suits had been just as much a uniform as their fatigues ever were. "I thought you'd show up sooner or later. Come on."

Phil took him to an office high in the Tower, full of nice furniture and big windows. It wasn't the kind of place you shot someone, not unless you didn't have any other choice.

"Sit down, Director. I know what you're thinking and I promise, you're perfectly safe."

Marcus sat. Phil's walls were plastered with photos and bios, mutants and metahumans and run of the mill humans with too much anger, guilt, time or money. "I never meant to abandon you. Do you understand that?"

"I understand." Phil did something to the fancy coffee machine in it's own alcove and watched it fill two cups. "It doesn't make it better, doesn't make the past year go away but I understand."

Marcus took the coffee cup but he didn't drink. "If I had known,"

"Don't." Phil was staring out the window. "This whole thing is on you. That job was my life but it isn't anymore. Don't expect the Avengers to be coming back to SHIELD any time soon, Director, but I can assure you I'm taking very good care of them."

"I understand." The barely contained rage made Phil seem as alien as the LMD had at first. "If we need them, they'll come?"

"If the world needs them, not SHIELD." Phil seemed to be watching Marcus through his reflection in the glass. "I'm furious at you. Clint is so far beyond that I'm not sure what the right word is. Stark… I hope you're not planning on buying a house. Ever. The rest of the team will calm down eventually."

"I don't need them to like me, just not stab me in the back." Marcus wished Phil would look at him, scream at him, anything but this calm dispassion. "After all these years, I finally let you down."

"You really did. I'll see you the next time the world ends, Director. JARVIS will show you out."

Cameras dogged him every step to the elevator and when he was inside he rested his head against polished metal and waited for the car to reach the parking garage. He hadn't even pushed a button.

Because their lives were just that crazy, Phil was waiting for him in the garage. "You didn't drink the coffee, did you?"

"No." Marcus slid into the passenger seat.

"Good. Never trust me when I'm that pissed off." Phil started the car. He'd been happy for an excuse to drive his baby. "Did you see him?"

"No and I still don't believe you." Marcus buckled his seat belt. Phil always drove like they were taking fire and it was worse in cities. "They were messing with your head, Phil. There is no way the Winter Soldier joined the Avengers."

"Believe what you want, I know what I saw." Phil pulled into traffic. "I'm going to need to leave you at the airport and meet up with my team. There's a floating corpse Upstate, we need to check it out."

It didn't really make sense, that one of them was taking it so much better. "Why are you here? Because the guy up there? I think he would rather have put a bullet in my brain than talk to me. I understand that reaction a lot more than yours."

"The guy up in that Tower has Clint. I have his job and his car, but he got the better deal. " Phil absently rubbed his empty ring finger, his eyes fixed on the traffic. "I'm alive because of what you did, Marcus. It's hard for me to be angry about being alive and easy for him. He'll cope."


	14. Chapter 14

Epilogue - Phil Coulson (Alpha Fork)

Summary: There is no happily ever after. There's just life.

Notes: And that's it, for the main story at least. Thank you to everyone who read this. I'm up to my ears in comments and I'll be answering them soon. It meant a lot to me that people read this, agonized over it like I did. This was supposed to be a short cute story about HR doing mean things to Fury, it ended up 25k words. I have more story to tell and I'll be adding snippets that just didn't belong in the main story (How Bucky came home, recruitment stories). Thank you again.

* * *

He was there, of course, coordinating the Avengers the next time the world went to hell.

Phil was too busy running the op from SHIELD's side to spare more than a passing thought for the other him, until the battle was over. He found his double in the back of an ambulance, getting stitches. "We were never very good at this part, but I'd like to remind you that handlers are supposed to stay out of the line of fire."

The mission had run seamlessly. They were different people now, but the foundation was the same. They thought the same way, made the same kinds of calls. "There was a perimeter breach. You would have done the same thing."

"Sure," Phil said, agreeably. "Because we're both androids with superior durability. Wait, that's just me." He sat down on the bumper of the ambulance. "Here's the thing I want you to remember. I am not some pale copy, I am you in every way that matters. If you die, doing something stupid and heroic? Clint will never forgive you. I will be on the first flight back to New York and I will be back in Clint's bed before you're in the ground. Do we understand each other?"

His double licked at his split lip. "Loud and clear."

"Good, I'm glad we had this chat." He gave himself a pat on the shoulder, maybe a little too hard, and went to find his team. There was a hell of a lot of cleanup to do and not much time before the looting started.

He caught site of Fitz and Simmons, scanning rubble with their strange little robots, Ward standing over them, eyes still darting around looking for danger. "Alright, let's hear it. What were these things?" He let their science babble wash over them. Somewhere close by, May would be warming up the jet and Skye would be monitoring Twitter for flare ups.

This job was his life and he did it very well. He'd trade with his double in a heartbeat but sometimes, you didn't get what you wanted, no matter how much you wished it was otherwise. Sometimes, there was no happily ever after, just life moving on like it always did. You rolled with it or got buried and Phil had always been good at rolling with the punches.


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter 15 - Recruiting: Peter Parker

Really, the way Coulson recruited Peter was sort of sneaky.

* * *

There was a strange car in the driveway when he got home from school. It instantly set Peter on edge. There was a fresh disaster waiting at the top of the walkway and he went to meet it with a knot in his stomach. Were they about to lose the house?

The kitchen was empty. "Aunt May?"

"In here, Peter." He followed her voice to the living room.

The good china teacups were set out and there was a man in a business suit sitting on the couch. Aunt May looked too happy for him to be from the bank. "There he is, Mr. Coulson. I told you he'd be home soon."

"Hello." Had he done anything lately to bring the Men in Black around? He couldn't think of anything.

"Good afternoon, Peter." The man seemed to be in a good mood, at least. "I'm here representing the Maria Stark Foundation. Your application has been approved."

Oh. That was good. Except, "Application?"

"For the lab internship. Your essay was very compelling." The man took another cup of coffee from Aunt May. "If you can come tomorrow after school, we can get you placed this week."

He hadn't applied to any internship, but he had written an essay about losing Uncle Ben and all the new responsibilities he'd found. He'd left crime fighting off the list, but he'd mentioned financial problems. This had to be because of his guidance counselor or maybe his English teacher. "I think there's been some kind of mistake."

"No mistake. We'll see you tomorrow at four, Mr. Parker. Please fill out this paperwork and bring it with you." The man gave him a stack of papers and a business card. "Thank you for the coffee."

"Oh, it was no trouble." Aunt May showed him to the door. "Thank you so much for giving Peter this opportunity."

"We're not giving him anything, ma'am. Peter earned this."

How exactly was he supposed to say no now? Especially since the moment the door closed Aunt May grabbed him by the shoulders. "Stark Industries! Peter, why didn't you say anything?"

Adding to the problem was the fact that it was a really good internship. Twelve hours a week when school was in session and an opportunity to be full time on breaks. The money was twice what he could make at a fast food job and Stark Industries was one hell of a resume builder.

Peter didn't exactly have time for an after school job. He had to keep his grades up at least until he had a college acceptance letter and he a girlfriend and a secret identitu that took up a lot of time. There was, however, the real possibility of them losing their house and if Peter could stop that, he had to try.

So, he took the train to Manhattan after school. Aunt May had given him a tie he was sure had been Uncle Ben's and it felt like a noose. Mister Coulson was waiting for him in the lobby and took him to a private elevator. "I thought we'd go right to Doctor Banner's lab. Just as a warning, he doesn't know he's getting an intern."

When Tony Stark had hired Doctor Banner, it had been all Harry's dad would talk about for a week. The man was a leading biophyicist, no wonder he didn't want a high schooler in his lab.

The doors opened on a lab behind glass doors. A man in a lab coat was inside, arguing with someone Peter couldn't see. Mister Coulson let himself in. "Bruce, I'd like you to meet your new intern."

"Steve, I'm going to have to call you back." Doctor Banner seemed startled. "Phil, no. Take him to Jane."

"The last thing Jane needs is another intern who doesn't understand a word she says. Peter belongs here."

Doctor Banner picked up a paperweight idly, rolling it between his hands. "You're sure about this?"

"I am. You know what I say about getting to them early."

Peter's senses went wild. It was the only warning he got before Doctor Banner whipped the paperweight at his head. When his hand snapped up to grab it, the doctor shrugged. "Alright. He can stay."

* * *

Doctor Banner was pretty much the last scientist in the world who needed an intern. He didn't teach so he didn't need quizzes graded, he didn't drink coffee, he washed his own glassware and a robot did the sweeping up. Mostly, Peter spent his afternoons babysitting the very expensive automated machines in the lab, feeding them fresh samples and changing their coolant tanks. He got a lot of homework done and his grades climbed back to where they'd been before Uncle Ben died.

Doctor Banner was always tired on Wednesday afternoons and his friend that worked in Security was usually hanging around. He seemed to get a kick out of Peter. "You okay, kid?"

The cuff of his hoodie had ridden up. His forearm was scraped and bruised where he'd skidded against a brick wall last night. "Yeah, I'm fine. it's nothing."

"Uhuh. I was fine a lot too. Bruce, how about you?"

Doctor Banner looked up from the viewscreen he'd been working from. "I'm always fine. Until I'm not."

"Someone doing this to you at home?" Clint gave the cuff of Peter's sweatshirt a tug.

"No!" The last thing he needed was Child Protective Services showing up at the house. "I got jumped, okay?" Thrown, actually, into a wall by a mutant but Clint didn't need to know that.

"Right. I'm stealing your intern for some self defense lessons."

After that, he spent an hour every day after work with Clint in the gym. It was less self-defense more how not to die and he got better with practice.

* * *

At the end of the school year, he finally fessed up. "I never applied for this internship."

"I know." Bruce looked at him over the rim of his teacup. "That's okay though. Coulson made the whole thing up. The Maria Stark foundation doesn't place interns here, Stark Industries finds their own."

"I have no idea how to react to that." Bruce poured him a cup of tea and Peter took it, starting to feel panicked. "Why?"

"Because you're a high school student running around at night in a spandex costume. We just thought you could use a little support."

"I'm not-" The hot water splashed from his mug onto his hands but he didn't put it down.

"Spider-Man? You're not a brilliant teenage meta-human in a desperate financial situation?" Bruce was smiling, like it was funny. "You know what desperate brilliant men do, Peter? Anything they have to. I've been there. We weren't sure, at first, if you'd done this to yourself on purpose."

He clutched the mug like a lifeline. "I didn't."

"I know." Bruce leaned back in his chair. "But I did." His eyes flashed green for a moment. "That's why I agreed to this."

"Are you… an Avenger?" Tony Stark called this place the Avenger's Tower and Peter wasn't stupid. He'd seen Captain America and Thor hanging around.

"We are. You probably saw the Other Guy, during the battle for New York." The Hulk. He'd been working for the Hulk. "For the past few months Clint's been training you, and I've been watching you. This wasn't an internship, it was an audition. I'd like to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative."

* * *

For my random ramblings, reblogs, and ficlets please find me on tumblr:


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter 16 - Missing Scene: Phil (LMD)

Summary: A missing scene from "A Quiet War" immediately after Chapter 12. Phil is falling apart.

Notes: Intended to invoke Malcolm Reynolds in Shindig's line about being a good man (or just an okay one)

* * *

He's a patched together mess, too many traumas, but he'd never actually cracked up before. He's not sure what he said or did, but Clint got his double out of the room in a hurry. "Hey, hey. Stop. Please, I'm sorry." He's shaking and he let Clint force him back into the chair. At least he wasn't cuffed this time. "I didn't know it was you, Phil. I'm sorry."

"I looked for you. For months. I would stay up till dawn, looking for your face in security footage, looking at dead bodies, trying to decide if you'd been the one to kill them." His hands are clutching Clint's shirt and Clint's hands are on his shoulders, rubbing small circles because he finds it calming. Phil had one crystal clear moment where he realized that if he pulled, Clint would be in his lap and about thirty seconds later they'd be on the floor. Clint couldn't tell them apart, couldn't see a difference. He'd tear his life apart, if Phil just pulled.

He doesn't. He's a better man than that. "And you've been right here. With me." He made his hands let go of Clint's shirt, made himself take a deep breath.

"Suzanne kept talking about how wrong you were. I didn't get what she meant, until now." There had been water bottles with lunch and Clint cracked one of them open, pressed it into his hands. "I thought she meant you were fake, but this is worse."

"Fury can't even look at me." And then Phil thought about what it meant, if he had never died. "Fury…"

"We never could make any sense of it." Clint dragged the chair over and sat down next to him. "He just left you there. When Bruce brought you home, I couldn't believe anything he said, because if Fury gave you up? There was no way you were ever coming back. Then you woke up and you were fine. It took some time for you to build your strength back up, and you drove me crazy. You drove Bruce crazy. I had to send you on a quest, Phil. A quest, because that is our lives now."

He can imagine if, if he tries. He has memories of the PT, he can imagine what it was like, if he'd had Clint. "I'm going to kill Fury."

"Yeah." Clint stood, offered him a hand up. "I figured. Come on, I sorta put your baby hacker in a room with nothing but JARVIS and Agent Ward for company."

And if he uses that hand to pull Clint to him when he stands up, so he can kiss him one last time? Well, maybe he's not such such a good guy after all.

* * *

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